ABSTRACT
Most people are familiar with the distance matrix in a road atlas. It gives the distance in miles or kilometres between the main towns in the atlas. Like cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS) is basically a descriptive technique that may be useful at an exploratory stage of research into some problem. It is also like cluster analysis in that it examines the distances between a set of entities to reveal their structure. Map plots are produced for representations in four, three and one dimension as well as in two dimensions. The plots in four and three dimensions are hard to read; probably this visual approach will only be useful if two dimensions suffice. On the MDS map obtained from this distance matrix, the tombs formed a shallow curve and their order along this curve was taken to be their temporal order.
