Approaches to Taxonomic Determination of Animal Images (Based on Siberian Petroglyphs)

Abstract

The article discusses the possibilities of taxonomic determinations of zoomorphic rock representations and the significance of these data for further interpretations, indirect dating and other scientific tasks. In addition to the applied method of zoomorphological description on the depicted animal’s exterior features, two approaches to the analysis of proportions have been proposed. The first basic-zoological approach is focused on the animal as a biological object and describes the ratio of animal body measurements according to the zoological standard of body measurements of large mammals. The second comparative-zoological approach requires the selection of proportions that are significant for each particular species, based on the morphological features of the animal exterior features. Both approaches have been tested on a sample of 30 petroglyphs from the rock art sites Kalbak-Tash I and Shalabolino, representing images of wild boars and bears. The obtained data on the proportions were analyzed using the principal component analysis (PCA), which allowed to verify the degree of differentiation between the images of the two selected species. As a result, we conclude that the comparative-zoological approach as a tool aimed at distinguishing the most significant features for taxonomic definitions of rock images is expedient.