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Animal Species Diversity on Prehistoric Rock Paintings
Sjahrirová, Nicole ; Hejcmanová, Pavla (advisor) ; Sýkorovský, Dalibor (referee)
The term rock art represents prehistoric, historic and present images, which are being created on the rocks or on the free stone panels. It constitutes important historic heritage to people. The meaning of the rock paintings is mostly spiritual or it is somehow connected with hunters and gatherers. The dating of the rock art is very difficult and it is almost not possible to determine the specific year of creation. The oldest rock art was created by the people in the prehistoric Stone Age. Rock paintings were discovered all around the world. I focused on rock paintings with zoomorphic motives on the American continent, especially in North America and Mexico.
The main purpose of this work was to describe animal species diversity on prehistoric rock paintings, especially focused on the life with wild animals and the beginning of agriculture in North America and Mexico. I created the database based on specialised articles that contains fifty various rock paintings with zoomorphic motifs. The database contains 25 different localities, primarily from the western USA. I identified 12 different species of animals in these paintings, the most numerous animal was the mountain sheep also known as the bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis), which had a big meaning for Indian culture in America. I processed all the data from the database and calculated the Shannon index. The value of the Shannon index was 1,5478, which means that the diversity of animals in North America and Mexico in these 50 processed paintings was determined as low. The Shannon index was also computed for each single region from the database. In the discussion I focused on bighorn sheep and its population in history and then I focused on the meaning and beneficial effect of the wild sheep for the prehistoric native people.
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