Exploring Modern Reindeer Herding Systems in Northeast Asia: Tracing Multispecies and Domestication Processes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Across Northern Eurasia reindeer have helped shape the complex socio-cultural fabrics of hunter-fisher societies. Descendant communities co-create entwined multispecies lifeways through symbiotic relationships with the subarctic boreal ecosystem. Within this system, an intimate partnership exists between domestic reindeer which retains aspects of mutualism and symbiosis and lacks certain common interventional and control features of animal domestication. Despite being a keystone species in the Eurasian north, however, their domestication lacks secure archaeological chronologies and time-depth. As techniques of investigation improve along with new narrative potentials other animate beings which co-construct domestic animal systems should be considered, beyond bilateral relation dynamics. Through collaboration with modern reindeer herding communities in West Siberia and Northwest Mongolia, we explore a range dynamics and tools for understanding reindeer domestication: how synanthropic insects can impact reindeer herding lifeways; and how many of these multispecies practices can be traced through reindeer diets using stable isotope analysis. We demonstrate how expanded multispecies considerations, biomolecular tools, and conceptual parameters have important implications for shaping the unique niche construction activities essential to herding reindeer, and by extension their domestication in Northeast Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52187