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<P align="justify"> Reindeer herding … <P align="justify"> Reindeer herding as a means of livelihood has been little documented in history, which may be a result of the fact that it has been practised in what the centres of power have regarded as outlying, barren regions. In practice, this means that the origins and development of reindeer herding especially before the later Middle Ages can only be dealt with from an essentially theoretical point of view. However, it is possible to claim with reasonable certainty that it is characteristically a Eurasian phenomenon. If we ignore various experiments in caribou and reindeer livestock farming, outside Eurasia reindeer herding on a large scale is found only in North America, and it did not spread there until the 1890s, when Dr. Sheldon Jackson brought the first 171 domestic reindeer to Alaska to compensate for the decline in whale fishing. Chukchi and Saami reindeer herders were employed to teach the Eskimos reindeer husbandry. Elsewhere outside the Eurasian circumpolar zone, in Greenland for example, reindeer herding is mainly a modern innovation. </p> <P align="justify"> Reindeer herding in the northern regions of Eurasia can be conveniently divided into two main historical processes: the ancient Arctic hunting culture and the relatively new large-scale reindeer husbandry culture. The former is a geographically widespread culture, but the time, place and means of domestication of the reindeer are extremely difficult to determine. For example, two major theories concerning the ways in which domestication took place have been advanced. According to the first, the earliest form of domestication was of wild reindeer; the hunters control of the herds gradually tightened, and the wildest individuals of mainly mountain reindeer were deliberately selected as prey for elimination, resulting in the gradual taming of the wild reindeer. This is indicated by similarities in the techniques of hunting and herding wild and domestic reindeer. For example, in Alta in Norway there is a 5000-6000-year-old wall painting depicting a pen for catching wild reindeer that vividly recalls the separation corrals that are in use today. The tapering fence corridors used in domestic reindeer herding are also commonly used for catching wild reindeer, but in reindeer herding the corridors end in pens rather than pits or traps. The lasso with its bone noose toggle <I>giella</i> has also spread extensively over the regions of the old reindeer hunting culture. </p> <P align="justify"> The second theory concerning the domestication of the mountain reindeer does not exclude the preceding one, but it emphasizes more the use of animals on heat as decoys. For example, a snare was attached to the horns of the decoy animal in which a wild reindeer becomes enmeshed in the process of driving off a competitor (the decoy). This method was used by the Saami, the Nenets and the Yukaghir, among others. The use of a rein on the decoy animal was practised at least among the Saami, the Nenets, the Khanty, the Chukchi and the Tungus. According to this, perhaps the more plausible of the two theories, the decoy reindeer were lured by using urine and salt and domesticated as draught animals. Then, when circumstances changed particularly as a result of the over-hunting of wild reindeer, these tamed animals were reared into the first domestic reindeer livestock. In this process, the reindeer became a direct rather than an indirect source of livelihood. </p> <P align="justify"> The time and place of the domestication of the mountain reindeer present equally difficult questions. For example, a reindeer sleigh typical of the kind used by the Nenets and estimated to be 3000 years old has been found in Saarijärvi in Central Finland. The oldest written sources that mention the herding of tamed reindeer are Chinese and date from 499 A.D., when the reindeer was milked in the land of Fusang in the Baikal region. The first written references to the development of reindeer herding among the Saami go back to 892 A.D., when Ottar, a Viking trader from the coast of Norway boasted to King Alfred of England that he owned 600 reindeer and six valuable decoy reindeer. An older pictorial source is a southern Siberian cave drawing 2000 years old depicting humans riding reindeer. Small-scale reindeer husbandry in ancient times to obtain draught, decoy and slaughter animals was practised widely over the Eurasian Arctic zone. In Scandinavia, small-scale reindeer herding is most characteristically represented by the so-called Forest Saami hunting culture. </p>d Forest Saami hunting culture. </p> +
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