We present results on the production of jets and "jet-like" clusters in 800 GeV/c proton-nucleus (PA) collisions. Events with high values of transverse energy in the central kinematic region were selected for nuclear targets of H, Be, C, Cu and Pb. A jet-finding algorithm was used in analyzing the data. The A-dependence of the jet and di-jet cross sections was parameterized as Aa. The values of a for events with "jet-like" cluster pairs found by the algorithm without any additional kinematic cuts reach a plateau of approximately 1.5 at di-jet transverse energies >11 GeV. The collimation of observed "jet-like" clusters decreases with A, and the fragmentation is softer for heavier target nuclei. However, nuclear effects become less pronounced with the increasing cluster or cluster-pair transverse energy. We argue that the observed nuclear enhancement for the production of "jet-like" clusters is due to soft-scattering contributions to the heavy nuclei data. We show that the nuclear enhancement becomes consistent with a value of Q within 0.10 from unity once kinematic cuts enhancing contributions from hard scattering are applied to the data.
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