Maxent Modeling for Distribution of Rock Art Landscape in Tongtian River Basin

From the perspective of landscape archaeology, the value of rock art is not only graphical semantics itself, but more importantly a relic of hunter-gatherers’ interaction with their living environment. The spatial distribution of rock art can be considered as a key indicator to understand the change of the historical environment and the evolution of human-environment relationship. This research investigates the rock art sites in Tongtian River basin of Yushu region, Qinghai Province. It firstly establishes a rock art GIS database with the data collected from archaeological reports. After dividing the sites into four groups according to their locations through the K-means analysis, eight parameters which may affect the spatial distribution of the rock art to test their influences are introdues. The spatial attributes of these parameters are derived from the database in various spatial analysis approaches, including the cost surface analysis and cumulative viewshed analysis. Then the Maxent archaeological predictive models are established for all the sites and each individual group of rock art, in order to calculate the relationship between the rock art distribution and the effecting parameters. The analytical results show that although the key factors are largely different in each location, there are still similarities among the rock art sites within each group. Compared to the earlier upstream sites, the site selection of the later downstream rock art is less influenced by accessibility to rivers and archaeological habitation sites, but more influenced by elevation and vegetation cover. The changes in the spatial distribution of rock art reflect the migration and adaptation to the environment of the early humans. The archaeological predictive model is finally introduced to predict the potential distribution of undiscovered rock art locations. The predictive maps can also serve as a guidance to designate the protection areas.