Intrasite Spatial Analysis

Intrasite spatial analysis studies how artifacts and features are distributed within a single site or living floor in order to reconstruct how space was used. Where settlement-pattern analysis treats whole sites as points, intrasite analysis zooms in to the scatter of tools, debris, hearths, and structures across an excavated surface, asking whether particular artifact types cluster together, whether activities were spatially segregated, and where discrete activity areas lay. The toolkit ranges from density and kernel mapping through clustering methods such as k-means to dimensional analysis of variance, the grid-based technique designed to find the scale at which artifacts are patterned. Ian Hodder and Clive Orton's Spatial Analysis in Archaeology set out the statistical foundations, and Conolly and Lake show how GIS-based density and association methods extend them.