Minimum number of individuals

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Minimum number of individuals, or MNI, is an often used term in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology, and refers to the fewest possible number of people or animals in a skeletal assemblage. It is used to determine an estimate of how many people or animals are present in a cluster of bones — which is useful for a number of reasons. If a mass grave has three people as its MNI it might be called into question as being a mass grave, even though it could have more than three. However, if it contains the remains of no fewer than ten people, that could strengthen a legal case or provide additional context for archaeological excavation.

While there are formulae that can be applied to determining MNI, it is essentially a logic game. If there are three examples of a right humerus, then obviously that implies there were at least three individuals. If those all three happen to be male, and there is a clearly female skull, then that adds one more to the MNI, and so on.

In osteoarchaeology and zooarchaeology the principle of the minimum number of individuals was defined by the ethnologist of North America T.E. White in 1953 (Klein, Richard G.; Kathryn Cruz-Uribe (1984). The Analysis of Animal Bones from Archaeological Sites. US: The University of Chicago Press, 26. ISBN 0-266-43958-5. ). The principle of MNI accounts for each possible individual human or animal as an individual unit in the most parsimonious way, meaning to count the least number of individuals in an archaeological site. An example of this is if there were two femurs, a left and a right, then the MNI=1. If there were two left femurs the MNI=2.

For more information on the applications of determining MNI, refer to bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology, osteology, or zooarchaeology.