The Emergence of Reindeer Herding in Northern Norway 2: Archaeological and Historical Evidence
Archaeological Perspectives on Hunter-Gatherer Landscapes and Resource Management in Interior North Norway - Marianne Skandfer
Bryan C. Hood [+]
UiT - the Arctic University of Norway
Bryan C. Hood is Professor Emeritus of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway. His research interests focus on Arctic and Subarctic hunter-gatherers, with fieldwork in northeastern Canada, Greenland, northern Norway and northwest Russia. He has published a book on the archaeology of northern Labrador, Canada, and papers on various aspects of the northern Norwegian Stone Age, including lithic procurement, Mesolithic settlement of the interior and coastal shellfish use. He is currently working on books dealing with Stone Age houses dated ca. 2000 BC in northeastern Norway and on the Kola Peninsula, Russia.
Description
The empirical evidence for the emergence of hunting-embedded herding and pastoralism in northern Norway is discussed with a combination of archaeological evidence and written sources form the early modern period. The archaeological data include rock art, reindeer hunting facilities such as corrals and hunting-pit systems, changes in settlement patterns, medieval and early modern archaeological sites, the summed probabilities of radiocarbon dates, and data from molecular genetics. A variety of documentary evidence is summarized, with a particular focus on the early modern Swedish state tax records for interior Finnmark and the 1605 Swedish reindeer inventory.