DEVELOPING A ZOOARCHAEOLOGICAL TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING REINDEER MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-11-01

The culling patterns of animals can offer insight into past and contemporary human subsistence strategies. Trying to understand mortality patterns of reindeer specifically, is essential because reindeer are the most common and numerous species among Pleistocene archaeological bone assemblages, and human-reindeer relationships remain to be important over time. Also today subsistence strategies related to reindeer remain to be traditional livelihoods that are carried out by many different ethnic indigenous Arctic peoples.There are several techniques for the ageing of the wild or (semi-)domestic reindeer/caribou (Rangifer tarandus) that concern the teeth, which are a good portion for age-at-death estimation for various reasons. Though, the techniques that are available for reindeer are mostly either expensive, time-consuming, complicated, destructive, or have been proven inaccurate, or a combination of these. The purpose of this project was to set out a visual, easy-to-use observation and recording scheme based on the dental ageing (i.e., tooth wear and eruption patterns) of reindeer on Edgeøya in particular, but which could be transferred to relative ages of other reindeer populations from both archaeological and modern assemblages. In this paper I discuss the development of this method, the
testing, and finally the application of the scheme on several archaeological assemblages. The scheme proves to be easy-to-use, non-destructive, cheap, fast, and generates accurate ageing data. This enhances the opportunities for examining the bio-cultural history of reindeer considerably, and opens up the possibility of generating large datasets that have the potential in understanding hunting and management practices and their change through time of both contemporary and prehistoric communities inhabiting the northern hemisphere.


Author(s): van den Berg, Mathilde - Çakirlar, Canan (University of Groningen)