On almost one-to-one maps

A continuous map of topological spaces is said to be almost -to- if the set of the points such that is dense in ; it is said to be light if pointwise preimages are zero dimensional. We study almost 1-to-1 light maps of some compact and -compact spaces (e.g., -manifolds or dendrites) and prove that in some important cases they must be homeomorphisms or embeddings. In a forthcoming paper we use these results and show that if is a minimal self-mapping of a 2-manifold , then point preimages under are tree-like continua and either is a union of 2-tori, or is a union of Klein bottles permuted by .