16367
Accession Number
6442
Title Of Article Chaper
The nearest-neighbor statistic: archaeological application and new developments
Title Of Journal Book
American antiquity
Volume
44
Issue
3
Pages
430-445
Reference Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references
Language Of Text
English
Literature Type
Serial
Literature Level
Analytic
Abstract
Human behavior has spatial corollaries of great importance to both geographers and archaeologists. Some of these corollaries can be expressed as point maps, and to describe them objectively it has become commonplace to employ the nearest-neighbor analysis technique devised by ecologists. But recently it has been shown that underestimation is an inherent flaw of the technique. Initially, therefore, the attention of this paper focuses on elimination of this problem by modifying the traditional formulae. With the flaw corrected, the issues surrounding interpretation of the nearest-neighbor statistic are discussed, and a review is made of the special difficulties of applying the technique to archaeological data.
pub_id
16367