a formal method of describing settlement patterns based on territorial divisions centered on a single site; the polygons are created by drawing straight lines between pairs of neighboring sites, then at the mid-point along each of these lines, a second series of lines are drawn at right angles to the first. Linking the second series of lines creates the Thiessen polygons.

a tesselation of the plane such that any given location is assigned to a tile according to the minimum distance between it and a single, previously sampled point.

See proximal polygons.