Heaps of fascinating fragments: reconstructing a medieval reindeer population based on bone middens from the Hardangervidda high mountain plateau, Norway

Abstract

AbstractThe results of a detailed morphological and pathological study on reindeer bones (Rangifer tarandus) from four medieval hunting stations on Hardangervidda are presented. As intensive marrow collecting left almost no bones intact, traditional sexing methods could only sparsely be applied. Alternative methods had to be explored to successfully assign the fragments to a sex. Employing linear discriminant analysis (LDA) on early‐ and non‐fusing skeletal elements, I have shown that (incomplete) calcanei, metapodia and phalanges I and II can be used successfully to assign a specimen to a sex and should no longer be excluded from osteometric analyses. Differences in the demographic compositions of the taphocoenoses lead to the assumption that hunters in the 11th century AD targeted large reindeer bucks, while at the 13th‐century sites, the complete biocoenose is represented, albeit in a different ratio. There seems to have been a shift in hunting technique: from selective hunting to mass hunting. Size wise, the reindeer from Hardangervidda were smaller than reindeer from contemporary assemblages from the Dovre area (central Norway), a population that is genetically different. Few pathologically affected bones were encountered in the material, but some cases of infections, bone lesions and a progressed osteosarcoma are described.