Spatial

Space is increasingly recognized as a legitimate factor that influences many processes and conceptual frameworks, including notions of spatial coherence and spatial heterogeneity that have been demonstrated to provide substance to both theory and explanation.

Space is a crucial variable in any economic activity. Spatial Economics is the branch of economics that explicitly aims to incorporate the space dimension in the analysis of economic phenomena. From its beginning in the last century, Spatial Economics has contributed to the understanding of the economy by developing plenty of theoretical models as well as econometric techniques having the “space” as a core dimension of the analysis.

This edited book is the first to bring together in one place new theoretical and empirical evidence as well as case studies about spatial spillovers, with a particular focus on spillovers in Asia. In the context of this book, spatial spillovers are locally bounded and territorially rooted interactions between one or more economic agents and their environments. They are salient because they affect regional economic growth and development. Specifically, the individual chapters in this book shed light on the different kinds of spatial spillovers witnessed in Asian regions, particularly those that derive from the acquisition and transfer of knowledge, those that arise from horizontal or vertical industrial interactions, and those that come about because of economic growth. The book departs from the existing literature in three ways. First, the book explicitly recognizes that different kinds of spatial spillovers have dissimilar impacts on the lives and therefore on the welfare of the residents of different regions. Second, the book emphasizes the varied dimensions of the interactions and the ways in which these dimensions influence different societies.

Investigations of archaeological intrasite spatial patterns have generally taken one of two directions: studies that introduced and explored methods for the analysis of archaeological spatial patterns or those that described and analyzed the for­ mation of spatial patterns in actuaiistic-ethnographic, experimental, or natu­ ral-contexts. The archaeological studies were largely quantitative in nature, concerned with the recognition and definition of patterns; the actualistic efforts were often oriented more toward interpretation, dealing with how patterns formed and what they meant. Our research group on archaeological spatial analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been working for several years on both quantitative and interpretive problems. Both lines of investigation are closely related and are important complements. In order to demonstrate the convergence of archaeological and actualistic studies for the understanding of intrasite spatial patterns, we organized a sympo­ sium at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology in Toronto, Canada, in May 1987. The symposium, titled "The Interpretation of Stone Age Archaeological Spatial Patterns," was organized into two sessions. The six papers presented in the morning session, five of which comprise Part I of this volume, focused on ethnoarchaeological and experimental research. Michael Schiffer was the discussant for this half of the symposium. Our intention for the ethnoarchaeological contributions to the symposium and volume was the delin­ eation of some of the significant accomplishments achieved thus far by actualistic studies regarding the formation of spatial patterns.

Spatial information is pervaded by uncertainty. Indeed, geographical data is often obtained by an imperfect interpretation of remote sensing images, while people attach ill-defined or ambiguous labels to places and their properties. As another example, medical images are often the result of measurements by imprecise sensors (e.g. MRI scans). Moreover, by processing spatial information in real-world applications, additional uncertainty is introduced, e.g.