Intrasite Spatial Analysis

They operate at different scales and answer different questions. Intersite or settlement-pattern analysis treats each site as a point on the landscape and asks how sites are distributed relative to one another and to resources — clustered, dispersed, or random across a region. Intrasite analysis zooms inside a single site and treats individual artifacts and features as the points of interest, asking how space was organized within that site and where activity areas lay. Many of the same statistical ideas — density, clustering, randomness baselines — apply at both scales, but intrasite work demands much finer spatial recording and is far more sensitive to formation processes and disturbance.

Dimensional analysis of variance is a grid-based technique that tests at what spatial scale artifacts are patterned by aggregating counts into progressively larger blocks and tracking the variance-to-mean ratio across block sizes. It matters because whether a distribution looks clustered or even depends heavily on the size of the counting unit: small quadrats and large quadrats can give opposite impressions of the same scatter. By scanning across scales, the method identifies the block size at which clustering is strongest, revealing the characteristic dimension of the clusters rather than an artifact of an arbitrary grid. Hodder and Orton present it precisely to escape the dependence of clustering judgments on quadrat size.

No. A concentration of artifacts can reflect where things were used, but it can equally reflect where they were dumped, swept, or redeposited, or where formation processes happened to preserve them. Cleaning of activity areas often moves debris to peripheral discard zones, so the primary work area may be artifact-poor while a secondary midden is artifact-rich. Distinguishing primary from secondary contexts requires additional evidence — refitting of broken pieces, microartifact distributions that resist sweeping, use-wear, and assessment of disturbance. Responsible interpretation treats clusters as hypotheses about the use of space to be tested against taphonomy, not as direct readouts of behavior.