Abstract

The chapter describes the importance of reindeer in the lives, histories, and prehistories of Indigenous people of Siberia. The multifaceted, commensal nature of the relationship and the persistent coexistence of wild and semi-tame reindeer offer an opportunity to understand the process of domestication in a more nuanced way. The diversity of reindeer is coupled with the diversity of northern Indigenous people through intersecting agencies. Historical actors—be they Indigenous people of Siberia, colonial officials and prisoners, reindeer, Arctic landscapes, or parasites that inhabit skins and furs—all play an active role in long-term processes. Pieces of nature, persistence of culture, and lasting moments of history should urge archaeologists to interweave difference and agency of nature in more creative ways so as to grapple with the notion of domestication in distinct corners of the world.

Siberian Indigenous communities have been used for centuries as a stand-in for various Western categories, mostly as a contrast to “civilized,” developed groups or as an imagined evolutionary stage en route to modernity (among many, see, e.g., Grant 1995; Gray et al. 2003; Jordan 2011; Tomášková 2013; Vitebsky 2005). Geographically placed somewhere between Asia and Europe as well as between temperate and Arctic climes, Siberia and its native people—if thought about at all—usually serve as a generic placeholder for larger forces moving to some other location (see Bassin 1991, 1999). Yet the long history of human-animal relationships in the region, particularly the commensal nature of living closely with reindeer, offers us an opportunity to approach the various Indigenous Siberian groups to think about prehistory, and domestication in particular, in more complicated ways. Reindeer are not only the region’s principal animal and an inseparable symbol of the native groups but are also creatures with more obvious agency than most because they are a species that has tolerated human presence without becoming fully domesticated. I therefore place reindeer at the center of histories of the northern regions to work through concepts of domestication and human-animal relations as experienced across millennia. The recent inclusion of non-human actors in archaeology is an exciting development (Conneller 2004; Coole and Frost 2010; Miller 2005; Olsen 2010; Overton and Hamilakis 2013; Robb 2015; see also Ammerman, chapter 10, and Bishop, chapter 8, both this volume). It allows us to position animals in prehistory and history as agents rather than merely targets of human action.

This chapter proposes to approach reindeer as a “toggle” of sorts, referring to an old device used in a harness to transmit a rider’s signal for redirection or a pause (figure 11.1). I mean to invoke a mental equivalent for archaeological analysis when approaching questions of domestication in prehistory. Here, this pause takes the form of the case of Siberia, encouraging us to take species, regions, and people more seriously when considering domestication. Reindeer may indeed be a unique animal in the history of human-animal relations, but it is one that can also serve as a toggle for thinking about other species and their places in human history.

Arguments and Agents

This work is based on my previous research in Siberia, specifically in the historical archives of German and Russian explorers and ethnographers of the region (Tomášková 2013). In reading these rich sources, I found myself repeatedly reminded that historical and ethnographic evidence remains ever situated in a specific social context. Historical actors were never blank slates when they carried out treks through the vast expanses of Siberia, whether driven by exploratory, scientific, or commercial motives. Each journey into an unknown place—ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork included—evokes a geography of imagination. Colonial encounters between explorers and native men and women, along with unfamiliar landscapes and animals, often resulted in a desire for knowledge interspersed with a complicated alchemy of fear, curiosity, and aggression. Siberia was no exception, but the colonial project in this part of the world possessed particular qualities that merit close attention. The history of Russian colonial expansion into the vast land to the east has only rarely been featured in the history of European science, and it is not frequently referenced in discussions of European colonial endeavors (Boeck 2009; Khodarkovsky 2002; Slezkine 1994). Yet historical threads tied to Siberian natives interlace the texts of disciplines such as anthropology, geography, and botany (Balzer 1995; Gingrich 2005; Krupnik and Fitzhugh 2001; Penny and Bunzl 2003; Shternberg and Grant 1999). Moreover, the histories, observations, and notes about the state of Siberia, its Indigenous people, and the animals that live with them do not neatly line up along a path to greater knowledge about the region and its people, let alone provide a template for understanding prehistory in general (for comparison, see, e.g., Anderson 2000; Appleby 2001; Argentov 1857; Bogoras 1904a, 1904b; Grant 1995; Willerslev 2007). Instead, we get a shifting mosaic, built from various pieces of information collected by successive travelers and scientists (Gray et al. 2003; Kivelson 2006).

In the course of my research, I came to see all of these historical actors as active agents whose very diversity enriches our images of Siberia, Arctic spaces, and the Ice Age, along with providing a wealth of notes on reindeer. Amid the remnants of strange and distant worlds, the traveling scientists projected their own assumptions and anxieties alongside the things they took as evidence. We should embrace those continuities and discontinuities, in both these ethnographic narratives and the archaeological record. I will make this point by describing the varied, even contradictory historical accounts of Siberian Indigenous reindeer herders. It is not my goal to highlight these ethnographies and descriptions as flawed, inaccurate, or useless for a discussion of prehistoric behavior. Rather, I offer a multiplicity of accounts of reindeer, people, and the relationships their proximity generated. These stories remind us that accounts of the prehistoric past can benefit when archaeologists stretch their imaginations and include margins and out-of-the-way places, when they do not follow only the well-trodden, previously accepted paths to such topics as animal domestication.

Before I describe in some detail the habits and characteristics of reindeer that lead to the suggestion that this particular species is better understood as “less than domesticated” or even periodically as “undomesticated,” I offer the rationale for such an argument. First, I draw attention to one of the perennial problems and solutions archaeologists have been dealing with for well over 100 years—that of analogy. Yet I am not inclined to scold or to claim that the analogies many of us use are simplistic, incorrect, or misleading. To the contrary, I want to restate the seemingly unremarkable case for analogical reasoning and ethnographic analogies. They are essential tools of archaeologists, part of both the justification and the interpretive process we regularly engage in. However, I suggest that the particular comparison on which any one analogy is based has far greater potential than we usually recognize. A point of comparison does not have to be the end station of our train to prehistory. Rather, it could prove a transfer stop to a richer and more imaginative understanding of both the prehistoric past and the state of the discipline of archaeology.

Here, I offer a discussion of reindeer in Siberia and the nature of their relationship with the native groups over many centuries as a path toward thinking about agency and difference, particularly different kinds of relationships humans have with nature (figure 11.2). In the classic mode of ethnographic analogy, I would like to expand the circuit in which comparisons travel to include the ethnographic present alongside the prehistoric past. Siberia boasts numerous examples of travelogues, scientific descriptions, and ethnographic accounts that provide impressions about a place, its peoples, its natural histories, and their intertwined relationships. I propose to amplify the focus on particular agents of the past and the present, specifically animals. Throughout history and prehistory, reindeer in Siberia had far more agency and autonomy; they allowed humans to create a commensal form of relationship not well captured by the terms game keeping or domestication. Thinking through reindeer, I suggest, would encourage archaeologists to look for other analogies, entertaining a larger variety of potential relationships among people, animals, plants, ice, and rocks that might otherwise escape notice. I use ethnographic accounts and historical travelogues from Siberia to make two points:

1. 1. Animals, be they wild or domesticated, have agency that can exceed human-centered visions. Many anthropologists and archaeologists have begun to work across the boundary between humans and animals or between nature and culture (e.g., Alberti et al. 2011; Conneller 2004; Kohn 2013; Overton and Hamilakis 2013; Stépanoff 2012; Vivieros de Castro 1998; Willerslev 2007). However, for the most part, archaeologists position animals in relation to humans and can still learn quite a bit from rethinking these relationships from other perspectives. To illustrate such an argument, I draw attention to reindeer to describe how people can exist on the margins of an animal world or create a new mode of existence co-produced by animals and humans. Siberian Indigenous stories and ethnographic accounts over the centuries provide abundant material to support such a claim.
2. 2. Histories, ethnographies, and the archaeological record consist of long and short strings out of which we create the fabric of the past and the present. Parts that fail to fit a given pattern often fall to one side, particularly when we strive to weave a seamless, linear account. By contrast, focusing on these scraps of narratives and stories collected along the way presents an opportunity to recognize other possible patterns to explore, ones that might alter the end product in unexpected ways.

Geographies and Analogies, Humans and Animals

The Neolithic Revolution, featuring the domestication of humans, animals, and plants into a settled village life, has constituted one of the central topics of archaeological research and debate since the inception of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. For an august figure such as V. Gordon Childe, the “individual expression of human activity” (1925:1) could be manifested only after the successful mastery of domestic animals and cultivated plants:

Throughout the long paleolithic period which reaches back far into geological time, man remained in a state of helpless barbarism, a mere food gatherer dependent for his livelihood on the products of the chase and fishing supplemented by such wild nuts and berries as mother Nature might provide. Paleolithic man had no domestic animals, save the dog and that only late in the epoch, practiced no agriculture, was ignorant of pottery, and did not polish stone or flint. The Neolithic period saw man master of his own food supply through the possession of domestic animals and cultivated plants and shaking off the shackles of environment by his skill in fashioning tools for tree-felling and carpentry, by organization for co-operative labour, and by the beginnings of commerce. The study of the paleolithic period belongs to the history of humanity as such. European civilization as a specific and individual expression of human activity only began to take shape during the Neolithic epoch. (1)

In this scenario, the persistent and conscious control of the immediate natural environment proved the essential building block, the stepping-stone of European civilization (Childe 1926). Childe was a meticulous and impressively erudite archaeologist; fully immersed in the humanistic philosophical thought of the day, he was convinced of the centrality of human reason in history and in progress of civilizations through the mastery of nature. Whether one considers Childe’s early publication, The Dawn of European Civilization (1925), or the work at the end of his career, The Prehistory of European Society (1958), it is clear that in his view it was the domestication of animals and plants, rather than chasing wild deer or catching fish, that provided the path to progress that led to the richness of European civilization (Harris 1994; Trigger 1980).

Archaeological methods changed dramatically over the span of the twentieth century, especially in the post–World War II period when we became the beneficiaries of military equipment and scientific techniques. Yet many of the central archaeological research questions and the geographies of their framing have changed far less. While the term Neolithic Revolution—coined by Childe in the early 1920s—may have a different resonance today, the counterintuitively labor-intensive process of animal and plant domestication continues to carry as much cachet as it did in the early twentieth century (see, e.g., Colledge and Conolly 2007; Watson 2009; Zeder 2015). Furthermore, I suggest that the specific geography of the discipline’s early focus on the fertile Eurasian “hilly flanks” (Young et al. 1983; Watson 2009) had a determining and lasting effect on the understanding of the process and on what counts as evidence in the search for origins of domestication and control of nature. The early villages, which turned into urban centers and led to civilization, located the beginnings of modernity in southwest Asia—the “Fertile Crescent” of prehistorians’ imaginations, as close to the historically presumed location of the Garden of Eden as possible. As Ofer Bar-Yosef (2007:x) pointed out, “The interest in the archaeology of the Near East was and is common among European and American scholars, and appears to be related first and foremost to the teaching of the Bible.” The specific animals and plants present in the cradle of early farming and subsequent settled village life presented paradigmatic examples of the dramatic change in human control of nature. Domestication of goats and sheep, unique and particular as it may have been, came to serve as the foundational referent for a universal process, subsequently mapped onto other geographic regions.

The puzzle of the “birth of civilization” attracted over a century of attention to southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. On one hand, we now have a wide range of impressively detailed accounts of individual sites, large settlements, dispersed villages, and urban centers (e.g., Adams 1965; Hammer and Arbuckle 2017; Smith 2019; Zeder 2008, 2011). Archaeologists accumulated vast amounts of data on the changes as well as the lasting practices of people who lived in the region for millennia (Arbuckle 2014; Hodder 2017). On the other hand, this unwavering geographic fixation on a particular ecological setting channeled research questions and the evidence collected in their pursuit toward a specific range of human practices, toward particular species native to the region. As T. P. O’Connor (1997:150), in rethinking the ancient relationships between humans and animals, has noted: “Perhaps if the archaeological discussion of animal domestication had begun with elephants, we might have arrived at a different model.”

The Neolithic narrative, located in the Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia, confirmed the revolutionary nature of the adoption of agriculture and its long-lasting consequences. However, the success of this synthetic interpretation also reinforced the Eurocentric view that such crops as wheat, barley, and pulses or such companion species as sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs were model citizen specimens to represent a larger mass (see, e.g., Young et al. 1983; Flannery 1983). As O’Connor (1997:150) stated, “The domestication debate has largely centered on the emergence of caprines as domestic livestock in that relatively small region between the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus mountains in the early Holocene.” The ensuing socioeconomic transformation from foraging societies to settled farmers subsequently served as a model that archaeologists followed in other parts of the world for most of the twentieth century (for a historical overview of the research, see O’Connor 1997; Russell 2002, 2007; Zeder 2008, 2011, 2012). The process of domestication of these particular species took the form of a sacred bundle of interconnected parts: changes in the size of the animals, their attachment to and dependence on humans, and their irreversible change into “domesticates” due to genetic breeding manipulated by humans. Animals, following their human “masters,” were not only domesticated; they, too, settled, no longer simply mobile or only migrating.

Not all human-animal encounters measure up equally when placed within the Neolithic template derived from southwest Asia. David G. Anderson and colleagues (2019:1) describe the implications of following the same Mediterranean model for both reindeer and the northern herders: “Within this framework, the domestication of reindeer by Eurasian Arctic peoples has been portrayed rather poorly, with reindeer being characterized as being ‘deficiently’ domesticated or at best in ‘an early stage’ of domestication. Siberian hunter-herders have been left out in the cold, as it were, since their pastoralist skills also place them outside of the debates on hunting and gathering adaptations.” After archaeologists working in other regions of the world joined the domestication debate, it became clear that other plant and animal species had had a sustained yet distinct relationship with people in prehistory; for example, as Patty Jo Watson (2009:3) noted, “evidence for a very different food-producing system was emerging in the Eastern Woodlands of North America.” Neither corn and squash nor llamas and turkeys behaved like wheat or goats. These plants and animals responded to human overtures and pressures quite differently than the initial prototypes from Eurasia.

In what follows, I focus on reindeer precisely because they do not fit the traditional domestication model. The species can thus guide us through a different relationship between people and animals in their prehistoric interactions. My intent is to complicate the debate about domestication and connections between animals and humans in several ways. First and foremost, as with all the chapters in this volume, I underline the agency of nature, specifically animal behavior in the history of human-reindeer interactions. Charles Stépanoff (2012:290) best captured the complex relationship between wild and domesticated reindeer: “The paradox of reindeer herding is that, compared to other domesticated species, humans can domesticate reindeer only if they keep them (in the) wild. Therefore, the reindeer retain an element of choice: even in the most controlled systems, they can find opportunities to abandon humans and go live without them in the tundra or the taiga.”

However, by paying attention to the degree to which reindeer have been domesticated or remained wild, turned feral or tame, whether they were migrating on their own or as companions to people, I pivot to a larger theoretical point. Specific species of plants and animals recovered in archaeological contexts provide the basis of analogy, a comparison drawn from a range of sources in which archaeologists routinely rely on historical and ethnographic accounts (for a discussion of analogy, see Watson 1999; Wylie 1985, 1992). Yet analogies archaeologists choose when discussing domestication or a transition from foraging to farming and settled village life are not simply neutral case studies, waiting to be picked. They have their own histories and lives and should therefore be treated with more explicit care and attention to the particulars. Specifically, I point to the geographies of our thinking and suggest that when engaged in model building, archaeologists rarely venture far from certain foundational places, to the detriment of areas deemed marginal or extreme such as the northern edges of continents. The herds of reindeer in northern Eurasia have been the exception to traditional models of domestication (Anderson et al. 2019; Stépanoff 2012; Vitebsky 2005; Vitebsky and Alekseyev 2015). But they also serve as useful cautionary guides to other species, other regions, and possibly more complicated prehistoric relationships between people and animals in varied kinds of landscapes, including the margins, be they northern or elsewhere. In effect, the very difference of reindeer from common domesticates of southwest Asia nudges us to consider other potential exceptions and geographies of human-animal relations.

Reindeer on Their Own in the World

Reindeer define the northern latitudes and serve as both a major signifier of the environment and a symbol of the imagination and politics of place (Stammler-Gossmann 2010). For centuries, they have acted as a proxy for the different ethnic groups of the Arctic, their cultures, their relationships, their subsistence practices, and their way of being. The animal stands in for the frozen North, to tell us about Indigenous peoples who herded them in our imagination. In discussions of animal masters, the reindeer has regularly functioned as a toggle, a creature that redirects attention by enabling talk about shamans, sacrifice, and hunting rituals in debates about the shift from hunting to domestication. Here, however, I want not only to take reindeer as a signifier of all things social and human but also to follow them in prying apart the terms game and keeper in gamekeeper, to consider the reindeer as a keeper rather than game.

Reindeer have a particularly complex relationship to humans in that they continue to exist in wild, domestic, and feral forms. Moreover, their domestication appears to have been a complicated process that did not follow the common logic of animal husbandry (Bjørnstad et al. 2012; Røed et al. 2018; Stépanoff 2012). According to archaeologists and biologists, reindeer were domesticated 3,000 years ago in the southern regions of Siberia and adjacent northern Mongolia (Anderson et al. 2019; Røed et al. 2018; Vitebsky 2005). Nevertheless, they were only partly domesticated in the Eurasian Arctic and the process never took place in North America, where the species goes under the name caribou (Røed et al. 2018). For all the images of Santa Claus coming from the North on a sleigh pulled by reindeer, the domestic caribou found in Alaska and the Canadian North were brought there only recently (in the 1880s; Vitebsky 2005). To complicate matters further, molecular analyses have brought to light several lineages of domestic reindeer across Eurasia, suggesting different origins for Fennoscandian and Siberian reindeer domestication (Bjørnstad et al. 2012).

According to prior studies, we are thus not dealing with one kind of reindeer but instead with animals that behave rather differently depending on their habitat: “The tundra reindeer is more gregarious and has evolved a more sophisticated social organization than the forest dwelling types, making them more prone for domestication” (Bjørnstad et al. 2012:107). Moreover, early attempts at domestication, which were clearly dependent on the animals’ social organization and chosen habitat, were not for the purpose of “animal mastery or even husbandry but instead to get closer to wild reindeer” (Vitebsky 2005). Reindeer are speedy herd animals; unlike deer, they are the earliest crowd-sourcers, which makes hunting them difficult. Reindeer keep each other company at all times; when under threat, they form a circle and pick up speed, running dizzyingly with no point of entry for a predator such as a human or a wolf: “Reindeer can run for many hours at twenty or thirty miles an hour and in bursts at double the speed . . . a wild tundra herd can travel 700–800 miles, a greater distance than any other land animal” (23). Only a sick or hurt animal finds itself in isolation, a potential dinner but not the best candidate for taming or breeding.

Historically, Indigenous people in Siberia partially domesticated a few reindeer so they could ride them and be able to get close to and hunt wild reindeer. The relationship between domesticated and wild reindeer clearly required a separate name for animals in each role—as the ancient Tungus, Samoyed, Yukaghir, and Koryak had assigned them—since they became one with the hunter but also remained the prey (Miller et al. 2009). To add to the complexity of the species, gender is a determining factor in the herd structure because a senior female is the lead animal among tundra reindeer when they move a long distance. Indigenous Siberians exploited this pattern and captured the senior female to disrupt group cohesion, thereby setting up a distinct negotiation of human and animal gender dynamics. Despite the patriarchal social structure of most Siberian groups, with male herders serving as the heads of households, women always tended the domestic reindeer. And yet they never succeeded in having a close relationship with the domestic reindeer in the same way they did with other tame or domesticated animals. A wild herd of reindeer may at any point sweep in at high speed and lure away the kept animals, turning them back into an undomesticated species in one fell swoop: “Siberian oral traditions recount cases of groups of herders that starved to death because their herds were driven away by huge wild reindeer herds” (Gurvich 1977:49–50, cited in Stépanoff 2012:289). To add to this complicated gender picture of human-animal relations, male reindeer of the domesticated kind were often neutered to increase their docility and to use their strength for digging the ground for pasture the remaining animals in the herd could rely on (Vitebsky 2005). These interventions fall somewhere closer to animal modification in the process of domestication, yet they did not lead to genetic changes, and they benefited the animal keepers only temporarily.

It is worth paying attention to what historical accounts tell us about the different Tungus and Samoyed terms for wild and domestic reindeer. As the terms suggest, in the eighteenth century they indeed were, and still are, different animals, even if deemed the same species in terms of biological classification (Miller et al. 2009). The native, far more intimate distinctions between different kinds of reindeer are a reminder of the messiness and the challenge of taxonomy in general. It is then worth asking, if we are to use reindeer in analogies for prehistoric behavior or in reconstructions of belief systems that involved supernatural gamekeepers, do we mean the domesticated or the wild reindeer? In some early ethnographies of Siberian Indigenous religious practitioners, a reindeer carried the shaman’s robe and a drum but was not used for riding or pulling a sled (Bogoras 1904a). As Piers Vitebsky (2005:25) points out, “Even transport reindeer may become uncooperative and recalcitrant if left unattended for a few days, and any domestic reindeer may revert to the wild if left unattended for longer.” The terms game keeping and domestic animal become only more fascinating and complex in this context.

The agency of reindeer, as impressive and convincing as it sounds, is complicated even more by the presence of other, much smaller, persistent companions. While reindeer coexist with humans in the world in a state of seeming truce or negotiated cohabitation, the warble fly (Hypoderma tarandi) and the reindeer nose botfly (Cephenemyia trompe), so-called obligate parasites, truly cannot exist without reindeer as the host animal. The warble fly lays eggs in the animal’s skin during the brief summer months, and the hatched larvae feed on the host’s proteins. Once they are too large to live under the skin, the larvae crawl out and drop to the ground where they mature into flies (Bogoras 1904a:80; Curtis 2015). The reindeer nose botflies behave similarly, but, as their name suggests, they use the reindeer’s nose as a point of entry through which to travel into the animal’s breathing passages. The larvae’s mature size becomes so unbearable that the desperate reindeer forcefully sneezes it out, thereby allowing it to complete the cycle and live its brief existence as a fly.

From the reindeers’ perspective, the arguably unpleasant natural cycle repeats itself annually and literally drives their behavior. The closer together they stay, the less the chance for a warble fly to get into their fur. Only the outlier reindeer are attacked and invaded, punishing the less-than-social and the weak. Females, young males, and calves are protected by their propensity to huddle and rub against each other; it is the senior males whose standoffishness leads them to become the most subject to fly attacks (Folstad et al. 1989). The botflies, in contrast, do not care for wind, inspiring reindeer to engage in high-speed dashes during the summer months in an effort to escape their tormentors. The faster the speed, the fewer nasty flies can invade or stay inside the reindeer’s nostrils. This leads to marathon summer runs in distances of hundreds of miles (Bogoras 1904a:80; Folstad et al. 1989; Vitebsky 2005). Herders, keepers, and owners of reindeer can only hope their domestic herds do not join the stampede and vanish for weeks, months, or forever.

In recognizing the role of flies in inspiring reindeer behavior, I do not intend to paint an image of an all-powerful, static natural cycle. Rather, the evidence suggests an intricate dance of coexistence, as people are not entirely helpless in the relationship with reindeer and their parasitic companions. They light fires to generate smoke that deters flies, and reindeer come close, crowding nearby. However, the bond remains loose, as the animals can easily walk off during the night or venture away once the summer fly torture is over. Many Siberian reindeer-herding Indigenous groups have another trick to play. Reindeer seek out salt, and herders attract them by offering it to lure the wild animals close to their settlements. While there are natural sources of salt that animals frequent, human urine seems to be a particularly delicious source, irresistible to reindeer. Men, not women, walk out in winter nights and mark the snow, which quickly turns into ice that reindeer lick: “Tozhu men are used to urinating near the house, often on a hollow stump, or even in a urinal specially constructed for reindeer: a tree trunk with a trough carved in it, adapted to [the] height of reindeer mouths” (Stépanoff 2012:293).

These gendered, intimate relationships between humans and reindeer suggest a different order of closeness between them than the terms domestication or even herding might suggest. The connection between species remains fluid and plural, without a single, stabilized state. When pursuing analogies in accounts of domestication, archaeologists might benefit by expanding the range of geographic, species, and relationship boundaries between the people and animals they consider throughout history. The reindeer in the Arctic is a wild animal but also a domesticated beast of burden (Anderson et al. 2019; Vitebsky and Alekseyev 2015). Therefore, the “ways of being a reindeer” stress the coexistence of humans and animals, not just co-dependence but actual living with, where the term keeping an animal may not always prove an apt description. Reindeer in the Siberian context were, and to a great extent still are, often the driving force in their relationships with people. At the same time, it would not do them justice to describe them as singular lead actors, any more than would positioning the human at the center of the universe. Rather, they are co-producers of the world—partly on their terms, even if not always exclusively of their own making (see Stépanoff 2012).

Reindeer Histories

I offer three brief examples from Siberian historical descriptions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. I do so to defend their usefulness as historical curiosities, as stories of the biased, prejudiced folly of colonial endeavors, but also as information that could inspire us to think laterally in new directions. Over the past several decades, literature in anthropology, sociology, and the history of science has urged us to adopt a far more complicated understanding of the emergence and popularity of specific theories and interpretations (Marchand 2009; Marchand et al. 1996; Penny and Bunzl 2003). Archaeology, seen through this lens, may be more than a progressivist discipline that dispenses with past theories as either misguided or simply wrong. Historical accounts are a useful reminder that every travel or ethnographic description is located in a specific time and place. As fanciful or strange as they may seem, such accounts can also serve as both a mirror of the larger scientific milieu and a reminder of our own positionality. Colonial, missionary, and military expeditions all impacted Indigenous peoples in Siberia in dramatic ways but with varying degrees of severity, rupture, and readjustment. It is therefore imperative that we see animal keeping and, more generally, animal relations among different Indigenous peoples of the region through the lens of such colonial history, not as unchanging and frozen in time. Reindeer in Siberia have been used to explain Indigenous ways of being in myriad ways, presenting a transfer point into other directions of inquiry. These animals stare at us, encouraging us to think more broadly and not simply to discount their stories.

Siberian tales and histories that stretch over several centuries feature a range of actors—some well represented and prominent, others in the background. Reindeer in many of these stories are equal partners and players. This may seem like an obvious point to those interested in animism, especially the kind championed by Victorian-era anthropologists such as Edward B. Tylor (1870) or the more recent return to the term in discussions of mimicry and the blurring of boundaries between human and natural worlds or bodily and spiritual realms (e.g., Willerslev 2007). Yet I would like to take reindeer even more literally and give them more agency, not merely personhood and human-like qualities. Tim Ingold’s inquiry “what is an animal” (1994b) and the even more specific query by Piers Vitebsky and Anatoly Alekseyev of “what is a reindeer” (2015) are serious questions, which suggest that the place of reindeer in the world of humans in Siberia was far greater than we imagined and worth close attention (see also Ingold 1980).

During the seventeenth century, Siberia already served as a place of banishment for prisoners of war conflicts, and it is in some of these early memoirs that we meet both Indigenous people and reindeer. Writing in 1658, Polish prisoners led to exile described their encounter with the Indigenous group of Tungus: “The Tungus were very generous to the prisoners, fed them and provided them with meat and furs for their journey. They were polygamous, some had as many as nine wives. Their reindeer herds were in the thousands or more” (Tugolukov 1985:42). From the perspective of the prisoners headed into exile, the natives lived in abundance, free to act as they wished and to move anywhere in this vast space. The nomadic lives of reindeer and Tungus were the embodiment of that which was denied to prisoners. The fact that the Tungus were described as men with numerous wives and plenty of animals is a reflection of the state of mind of the Polish captives—homo-sociality for years to come, if not the rest of their lives; men in the company of only men, deprived of any ability to grow food or to farm. Reindeer stood in for freedom to move away, for wealth and a lack of human company and domesticity for the prisoners and an abundance of freedom for the natives. Whether the Tungus actually owned thousands of heads of reindeer or merely lived in their company we do not know, but their presence is not disputed. Whether the reindeer were truly domesticated or merely grazed close by cannot be established either. Prisoners who arrived from Poland would have only been familiar with herds of cows, sheep, or goats known from any European village. Herds of large animals near a settlement would have been perceived as a highly desirable ownership of abundance. The supernatural nature of the relationship would not have been a part of the picture; rather, the material existence of plenty was what mattered most.

In 1730, a strikingly different yet equally insightful account of reliance on reindeer appeared in Gerhard Friedrich Mueller’s (1764) description of his multi-year travels through Eurasia.1 As a historian, Mueller tried to trace geographic diffusion as well as linguistic affinities to explain how the different tribes found themselves in their locations. In his description of Indigenous ownership and husbandry of reindeer, Indigenous peoples had entirely different words for domestic and wild reindeer, as if they were completely different kinds of animals (Miller 2009:223; table 11.1).

Table 11.1. Indigenous peoples’ words for domestic and wild reindeer

Mueller suggested that in their ancient homeland, they must have been accustomed only to wild reindeer and that domestication occurred after they arrived in their current lands. Mueller’s history of Siberia has been valorized in Russian science as “the first scientific study of Siberia” and in German sources as the proof of German scientific superiority (Mueller 1732; Miller et al. 1996). Whichever of these national sentiments one accepts, he contributed to the knowledge of Indigenous people of Siberia by treating each group as its own distinct linguistic entity. Moreover, he offered one of the earliest known insights into wild and domesticated reindeer. As a historian and a scientist in the eighteenth century, his awareness of the migration of peoples and the progress from wild to domestic animals is impressively modern, a view that would have held up into the twentieth century. The linguistic (and ontological) distinction between wild and domesticated reindeer persists among some groups to this day, as noted by Stépanoff (2012:291) in writing about the Tozhu people in the Tuva region of southern Siberia: “Although domestic reindeer have a different name (ivi) from wild reindeer (taspanan) and are called mal (or ‘cattle’), Tozhu partly treat them as wild beasts. For instance, Tozhu say that only wild game (aŋ) liver must be eaten raw. However, when they kill a domestic reindeer, they eat its liver raw as well. They would not eat the liver of cow or a sheep in this way.”

The final account I would like to highlight is that of the 1890s Siberian revolutionary exiles. They were firm believers in the possibility of a “different society” in terms of hierarchy, social inequality, and material possessions. At the same time, they were aware of the centuries of Russian expansion into Asia and the impact it had on the Indigenous groups of Siberia. Waldemar Bogoras (1904a, 1904b), Waldemar Jochelson 1910, and Lev ͡IAkovlevich Shternberg and Bruce Grant (1999) used reindeer in their writing as a proxy for social ties, for caring for and being with others, as well as the possibility of other worlds that could be. The herds the Reindeer Chukchee had were an expression and a mechanism of community care; among reindeer, there was never a single, isolated animal, just as there was no abandoned person or a poor family left alone. Reindeer both represented and embodied wealth, care, mobility, and stability; the constellation of the stars; and the material embodiment of spirits, as Bogoras (1904b:624) noted in his account of the Reindeer Chukchee: “All families of the Reindeer Chukchee are connected among themselves by ties of relationship. Thus, a poor family without relatives is almost impossible.”

At the same time, the animals and their spirits were co-producers of this world and had power over the people to withhold not just resources but also tranquility, peace of mind, and health. The exiles reported a spirit known as the Reindeer Being, represented with one eye closed as a sign that it has lessened the supply of reindeer. When it closes its other eye, all reindeer will vanish (Bogoras 1904b:316). In this understanding, the boundary between humans and animals is absent; the seamless transition between a reindeer and its all-powerful spiritual avatar that can grant or withhold the presence of the species indicates the power reindeer had in the company of people:

Picvu’čin is a special “owner” of wild reindeer and of all land-game. He lives in deep ravines and stays near the forest-border. From there he sends reindeer-herds to the hunters; but when he is angered, he withholds the supply. He is especially strict in demanding the performance of all ancient customs and sacrifices connected with the hunt and resents every slight neglect of them. He is represented as very small, not larger than a man’s finger, and his footprints on the snow are like those of a mouse. Picvu’čin rides the largest bucks in his herds: therefore, wild reindeer bucks are found with the hair on their shoulders all roughened up. (286)

Yet Bogoras makes it very clear that the beliefs, stories, and practices are not Indigenous traditions in any simple sense as timeless practices unchanged for centuries. Rather, they are the result of colonialism, conflicts, and impressive adjustments to regimes of power. Even reindeer and their “masters” change with time:

“Masters” of the forest are, in the Russo-Yukaghir conception, exceedingly fond of drinking brandy and of playing cards. Even now those hunters who are most successful in trapping are reputed by the Russianized natives to have bought their luck from the “master” of the forest with brandy and packs of cards . . . The best material for sacrifice is tobacco. On the whole, the natives in many cases prefer to sacrifice imported provisions, Russian or American, supposing that the local “masters” and deities need them much more than ordinary food, which is abundant. (287–288)

The Nature of Agencies

Judging from ethnographic, biological, and historical accounts, reindeer have occupied a central place in the lives, imaginations, languages, religious practices, and ways of being of herders of northern Eurasia for millennia. What, then, are archaeologists to do with such stories in attempts to interpret prehistoric materials using analogy? A recent spirited exchange between Rane Willerslev and colleagues (2015) and Tim Ingold (2015) rested in a disagreement over the nature of the relationship between domestication and hunting among northern peoples (in reference to Ingold 1994a). Ingold (2015:27) pushed back against Willerslev’s notion of hunting as a distinct form of sacrifice and argued that there were two potential perspectives: “The [first is the] patriarchal model, applicable to Near and Middle Eastern pastoralism as represented in biblical accounts and associated with the proximate power of ancient kingdoms. The other is the northern circumpolar model, where the control of the pastoralist over his herd is not at all like that of a ruler over his subjects but very much like that of the spirit master over animals which are really just refractions of his own being.”

The transition to domestic animals is of great interest to archaeologists, who regularly draw on ethnographic analogies to support their interpretations of the archaeological record. My brief review of diverse historical accounts that span several centuries suggests that the example of reindeer in Siberia reminds us that there is more to the animal and to the perceived relationships with Indigenous people than is generally thought. Reindeer in Siberia were a source of wealth for humans, the embodiment of mobility and freedom, the essence and spirit of relationality, and a critical tie between the worlds of people and animals (figure 11.3). But reindeer remained partly wild, encouraging people to follow their migrations and mimic their sociality. In this sense, they were co-producers of that same world, keeping humans who lived alongside them as much as they were kept by them. Other animals in different parts of the world may have played larger cohabiting roles that similarly do not fall easily along the domestic-wild divide. Domesticating an animal may have entailed a broad range of practices, beliefs, and relations. In this respect, the reindeer from Siberia offers a good proxy for agency, acting on the world where categories of humans, animals, wild, and domestic are not easily separated and need to be thought through from other perspectives. Like the toggle in a harness, their very existence can nudge us in the direction of thinking otherwise.

Note

References