ABSTRACT
Distance is the most fundamental property of spatial data. It is the fact that proximity, or distance from one another, may have a direct influence upon the attributes or relationships between things that makes explicitly geographic observations different from other types of data. Proximity and distance are also at the core of many important archaeological questions. The task that archaeology sets itself as a discipline is to explain the material remains of the past, and this clearly includes a desire to explain how things came to be where they are, and incidentally, are not in any of the other places they might have been.
