Geometrical regions

Geometrical regions are defined in abstract spatial terms and do not take account of the content
of space. As a result they are mostly analytical, since very few realworld spatial processes are
unaffected by what is 'on the ground'. Geometrical regions are most commonly produced by
buffering (also called proximity analysis) and tessellation.

10.2.1 Buffering
The simplest kind of buffer is a region containing all locations within a certain proximity to
particular geographically referenced entity (the origin). The proximity is usually specified in terms
of a maximum distance, or both a minimum and maximum distance. In Fig. 7.5 we illustrated the
result of a distance or buffer query performed on point, linear and areal entities. A single buffer
generated from a linear entity such as a river or road is often referred to as a corridor It is also
possible to créate multiple buffers,in which case mínimum and máximum values are usually
chosen so as to produce a set of contiguous buffers (zones) of ever increasing distance from the
origin (Fig. 10.1).

The presence or absence of a specified location within a particular zone provide, categorical
information about the distance from that location to the origin. If the zones are made suitably
narrow with reference to the map resolution, then the effect is analogous to the process of creating
a continuous proximity surface by spreading (see Section 10.3.1). In this case, the presence of a
specified location in a particular zone does essentially record the actual distance from that location
to the origin. Single and multiple buffers can also be generated from multiple origins, in which
case the buffers are computed according to the distance from the nearest origin (Fig. 10.2).

Since buffers are discrete entities they are most efficiently represented as polygons in a vector
map. Consequently, almost all vector-base GIS software provides push-button functionality for
the computation of single and multiple buffers from one or more origins. A particular virtue of the
vector representation of buffers is that they may then be included in spatial queries implemented
using polygon overlay (Chapter 7). In this way it would be easy, for example, to identify all
archaeological sites that fall within the jurisdiction of a particular local authority and which are also
located within 50 m of a proposed new road. It is, however, also posible to represent buffers in
raster databases. While single buffers can be represented by Boolean maps, with cells coded I if
they are inside the buffer and 0 if they are outside, multiple buffers must be represented by coding
cells according to the category value of the buffer in which they fall. Traditionally, raster buffers
are created by reclassifying a continuous proximity surface, but many raster-based GIS packages
now offer push-button functionality for this task.

We have included buffers as examples of geometrical regions because they are almost always
calculated solely on the basis of Euclidean distance. However, Euclidean distance is not
necessarily the most appropriate measure of proximity: other measures that have potential
application in archaeology include travel time, the concentration of chemicals diffusing from a
source, intervisibility and measures of the possibility of flooding. Map algebra and reclassification
can be used to créate buffers representing distance conceived in tems of categorical attributes,
such as intervisibility and location on the floodplain. Buffers representing distance conceived in
terms of continuous attributes, such as travel time, must usually be derived from the results of
spreading (see Section 10.3.1 below).

10.2.2 Tessellation
Tessellation is simply the process of dividing an area into a set of smaller tiles such that there are
no gaps between the tiles. Raster maps are one example of a tessellation, but in this caset the
tiles (i.e. map cells) are not normally interpreted as meaningful regions. Here we are more
interested in tessellations constructed for analytical purposes. By far the most common of these
is a method referred to variously as Dirichlet tessellations, V,oronoi diagrams or, more frequently,
Thiessen polygons. Given an initial distribution of points, the tessellation divides an area so that
each point is enclosed by exactly one polygon which also contains all the space that is closer to
that point than any other. The polygon may then inherit an attribute of its defining point so that it
becomes in fact a simple form of interpolation. This method can be used for interpolation of
categorical point observations, such as to create continuous soil maps from borehole data (Fig.
10.3).
The New Geography pioneered the use of Thiessen polygons to define the spheres of influence
of urban centres, an idea which found its way into Clarke's (1968) manifesto for the New
Archaeology. Thiessen polygons were subsequently used to define 'territories' for archaeologicas
site types, including Neolithic long barrows (Renfrew 1976), hillforts (Cunliffe 1971) and Romano-
British settlements (Hodder and Hassell 1971b). In these cases they implemented a clear
rationale for allocation of territories: that control should be ascribed to the nearest site. To the
extent that this rationale is made explicit, the use of Thiessen polygons represented an
improvement on ad hoc methods such as the 'squeezing' of circular buffers (Dennell and Weblel,
1975; see Steinberg 1996; Perlés 2001, pp. 139-143 for more recent uses). However. few
archaeologists would today accept the underlying assumptions that inffuence is independent of
the cost of transport, the size of the centre and a myriad of other social and cultural factors (see,
for example, Milner's 1996 review of Peregrine's 1995 application).

There are no 'textbook' methods for adjusting tessellations to reflect how the content of individual
tiles influences their extent through factors such as the cost of transport. This is not surprising,
since geometrical methods for constructing regions ignore the content of space; spreading
provides a more appropriate method when the latter is important. It is, however, possible to adjust
the extent of individual tiles according to the relative importance of each of the points from which
the tessellation was generated. In this case the 'importance' may be a measure of anything from
population size to the presence or absence of a religious centre.

The basic premise of gravity modelling is that the intensity of interaction between locations is
directly proportional to some quantity at those locations and inversely proportional to the
intervening distance (Hodder and Orton 1976, pp. 187-195). For example - and very crudely - it
predicts more interaction between large settlements than between small settlements, and that the
amount of interaction is less if the settlements were far apart rather than nearby. For example,
Jochim (1976, pp. 55-62) has used gravity modelling to investigate the ‘differential “pulls" of
various resources on [site location]' in Mesolithic Germany. One very simple method for adjusting
the size of Thiessen polygons - by weighting them according to the relative size or importance of
the individual points - is described in Box 10.1. An alternative approach that employs weighted
boundaries to allow for dominance of one tenitory over another was devised by Renfrew and
Level (1979) and is called the XTENT model. There are, however very few applications beyond
their trial formulation, largely because of the acknow ledged subjectivity in determining the value
of the constant that determines whether territories are likely to be more or less autonomous.

Box 10.1 Weighting Thiessen polygons

One possible equation to weight Thiessen polygons, and thus to model the boundary between
two settlements, i and j is:

where Pi and Pj are the two population sizes, Dij is the distance between them and Dxj is the
distance from settlement j at which the boundary may be drawn (Hodder and Or ton 1976, p.188).

Constructing weighted Thiessen polygons based on this gravity model in a GIS involves first
establishing the smallest convex hull around each point using its neighbouring points as vertices.
Weighted polygons may then be constructed by first connecting a series of point locations with
line segments and erecting perpendiculars to those line segments at the point defined by Dxj, and
then extending those perpendiculars until they intersect. An alternative is provided by
Aurenhammer and Edelsbrunner (1984). Weighting Thiessen polygons is not provided as a built-
in function of desktop GIS, so implementing this algorithm in mainstream commercial GIS
packages will likely require the writing of a script. Altenatively, freely available standalone
programs such as Gambini (Tiefelsdorf and Boots n.d.) or VPPIants (Gavrilova n.d.) perform this
function, and the latter permits the export of the results so they can be placed back into a GIS.