The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Voi. XXXVII. Part B4. Beijing 2008 
171 
It is worth mentioning that about one third of the observed sites 
contain Obsidian artifacts which for the most part have 
distributed on the surface of the sites. It is interesting that 
almost all the sites with Obsidian have been located in areas 
with low elevations in the coasts of Urmia Lake. Layers whose 
distance from passable ancient roads was calculated, show a 
linear pattern which has connected Obsidian-laden sites with 
each other. This assumption may account for the economic site 
distribution patterns however, pinpointing it needs further 
studies (Figure 2). 
As a final word, archaeological challenges in the region-such as 
this research ran into- may be comprehended by considering the 
effect of socio-economic and political behaviors on the 
formation of archaeological sites. But it is very difficult to 
observe such behaviors by the conventional method (Pickering 
1994). 
In this article, site distribution analysis is proposed as an 
approach to discovering the spatial relationship of observed 
archaeological data. Therefore, this approach has the potential 
for explaining a wide range of theoretical and practical 
foundations of the behaviors which archaeology deals with. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
The authors gratefully acknowledges the preceding work 
required to develop the Arc View Extensions by Wong, D.W.S. 
and Lee, J. These are available from : USGS Planetary GIS web 
server (PIGWAD). 
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