Exploring modern reindeer herding systems in North Asia : lessons in multispecies nexus and archaeological potentials

In North Asia, small herds of Rangifer tarandus (reindeer and caribou) are kept herd animals amongst numerous Indigenous groups. 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. Prevailing anthropocentric frameworks for defining relationships between humans and other animate beings are increasingly critiqued for their erasure of the potential range of human-nonhuman systems. Human-reindeer relationships are a primary example of this type of erasure, despite ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence suggesting reindeer herding is not a recent development, and neither is their mutualistic herded modus. Considering these critiques as well as recent improvements in osteological and biomolecular techniques for investigating reindeer, there is a need to reconsider the coexistence observed between humans and reindeer and situate the complimentary intersection of hunting and animal husbandry in the circumpolar world within domestication research.

In collaboration with modern reindeer herding communities in West Siberia and Northwest Mongolia, a range frameworks, tools, and techniques for understanding reindeer domestication are explored. Through expanded multispecies considerations and conceptual parameters, this dissertation identifies three scales of nexus of multispecies lifeways between reindeer and herder and other nonhumans.