Archaeobiologists and ecologists have a long-standing interest in how best to estimate the number of species in an assemblage (past or present) with limited samples. The sampling to redundancy method for evaluating species richness and diversity is a well established approach for assessing sample adequacy and has been used by archaeologists for various classes of remains. In a recent article in this journal, Lyman and Ames (2004) explore the utility of this method for zooarchaeological specimens. In this note, we discuss some fundamental issues associated with the sampling to redundancy method, and make some recommendations for using this method to evaluate richness and diversity of archaeobiological assemblages.
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Lepofsky et al. (2005) studied this question.
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