Title: The reconstruction of extended sources and inclusions using equivalent point sources Abstract: The basis of most imaging methods is to detect hidden obstacles or inclusions within a body when one can only make measurements on an exterior surface. Such is the ubiquity of these problems, the underlying model can lead to a partial differential equation of any of the major types, but here we focus on the elliptic case. In particular we consider steady-state electrostatic or thermal imaging and giving boundary value problems for Laplace's equation or, for the case of inverse scattering and near/far field data, the Helmholtz equation. Our inclusions can be interior forces with compact support or obstacles with a fixed, given boundary condition although we shall concentrate on the former situation. We propose a series of algorithms that under certain assumptions allows for the determination of the support set by solving a simpler ``equivalent point source'' problem.