Session III: Reindeer Avalanche

Domesticated reindeer in Mongolia are primarily used for riding and packing.

Dates: August 14 - September 5, 2025

Fee: $4,250 USD

Course Description:

Why are we doing this?

Animal remains in archaeological sites have the exponential capacity to help us understand how past people lived, perceived, and interacted with their surrounding world. In Mongolia, studying these animal remains, through the analysis of bones and using more complex scientific techniques like stable isotopes and genetics, has helped us reconstruct the extraordinary time-depth of Mongolia’s pastoral lifeways. As reindeer herding represents a key circumpolar lifeway, and an important domesticated animal in the arctic and subarctic alongside dogs, the presence of reindeer herding in Mongolia has important implications for understanding the species’ domestication as well as cultural influence and connectivity between boreal and steppe peoples in the past. Despite this, reindeer herding which occurs in the high elevation forest “taiga” of Mongolia, is far lesser understood than, for example, sheep, cattle or horse.

The challenge for resolving this is that, archaeologically, reindeer herding is very difficult to track and currently no known archaeological reindeer remains have been discovered in Mongolia. They are also largely scarce across North Asia despite their deep importance to reindeer-herding Indigenous communities today. Currently, therefore, our tools to trace reindeer herding in the past relies on investigating the observable impacts of herding in modern contexts and on modern reindeer—which is not uncommon in the zooarchaeology sub-discipline. Zooarchaeologists routinely rely on modern skeletal remains as points of reference and as baselines for investigating ancient remains.

In recent years, NOMAD Science has been working in the taiga with reindeer herders, to better understand the practice and possible deeper (pre)historic ties to the region. Now, we seek to expand on the cumulative work from several of our team’s research endeavours on a much larger scale.

In the winter of 2023-2024, a herd of reindeer was caught in an avalanche and perished. From this unfortunate event, it is possible to gather extensive and high-resolution data from the deceased animals as the life history, diet, and mobility can be known through our partnership with local herders. This can offer important inroads for investigating reindeer domestication using zooarchaeological methods—improving and expanding tools we have already found in previous research. This session will focus on locating the reindeer in the avalanche site in the remote taiga forest. Using herder knowledge in combination with thermal mapping via drone survey we will locate cadavers, excavate where needed and be actively processing skeletons to collect osteological data and samples from the deceased herd.

Participation will be limited to just a few brave souls who are willing to travel to a very remote region and handle reindeer carcasses in various stages of decay. As the trail to this region is tricky and long, you must have previous horse-riding experience that includes rough trail conditions.

This program does require that participants handle reindeer carcasses much fresher than the reindeer bones pictures here.

Field Activities and Skills

The NOMAD Science team will be travelling by horse back into an extremely remote part of the Mongolian taiga to reach the avalanche site. Participants get to join an international team of researchers and will learn drone mapping skills, have a basic introduction to zooarchaeological methods and skeleton processing and handling (crucial to the subfield), an introduction to stable isotopes and field-sampling, as well as lessons in ecology and its role in archaeological research. Teaching and experience in ethnographic fieldwork will also be a part of the session. Skills that will be learned and practiced include: navigation, pedestrian survey, drone photography and mapping, community interaction, and zooarchaeology and isotopes methods. Students interested in this session would be especially positioned for future work in remote anthropological and archaeological fieldwork, as well as higher-level education in zooarchaeological and biomolecular specialization.

Please remember, prior experience is required, particularly regarding horseback-riding in dynamic and rough terrain.

Intended Outcomes

The activities of this program will expand and improve existing methods and tools for identifying and investigating reindeer domestication, and animal domestication more broadly. Furthremore, new areas of the Taiga/Tundra will be surveyed to add to our fledgling inventory of high-altitude archaeological sites in northern Mongolia (See Session II).