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<P align="justify"> Although the dev … <P align="justify"> Although the development of large-scale reindeer herding as an activity aimed at actual primary production is a fairly new phenomenon, it too is impossible to locate as an innovation in any one place; rather it evolved simultaneously in several different places as a result of similar conditions. For example, the widespread use of earmarks, dogs, lassos and skis by the Saami is paralleled by a similar development at least among the Nenets. On the other hand, it has been claimed that pastoral reindeer herding among the Nenets began in the eighteenth century, that is 100 200 years later than large-scale reindeer herding among the Saami. Among the Chukchi, commercial reindeer herding on a large scale apparently did not develop until the nineteenth century. </P>
<P align="justify"> The initial impetus for the development of a culture of large-scale reindeer husbandry among the Fell Saami may have come from the ending of the hunting of wild reindeer in the Norwegian mountains halfway through the fourteenth century, when the Black Death of 1349 left the mountain villages desolated. According to the theory, the decline in the hunting of wild reindeer had the effect that people living in the immediate vicinity around the central region of the Kjölen mountains shifted from hunting to rearing herds of domestic reindeer. It has in fact been suggested that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the evolving Fell Saami culture reared its livestock from previously tamed reindeer. This took place mainly in the Vefsen region, where goat and sheep farming spread about the same time. The interrelationship between large-scale reindeer herding and the cattle husbandry of Indo-European peoples is evidenced by the vocabulary of reindeer milk production, which borrowed words into Saami from Proto-Scandinavian c. 200-800 B.C. However, the first certain data relating to the existence of individual reindeer herds numbering several hundred animals and regular annual migrations come from documents such as tax rolls in central Sweden and Norway dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. </P>
<P align="justify">Reindeer husbandry for meat, skins and dairy produce with the herding of large stocks of tame reindeer began to spread as a primary source of livelihood in the fourteenth century from the central region of the Kjolen mountains and reached what is today called Upper Lapland by the seventeenth century. The culture of large-scale reindeer husbandry probably spread as the Reindeer Saami moved in search of new pastures, and the Forest Saami, who had lived by hunting, adopted a new way of life. Among the major reasons for the change in the way of life was undoubtedly the rapid decrease on the numbers of wild forest and mountain reindeer that took place as a result of an increase in the number of firearms and the establishment of pioneer farms on the old hunting grounds from the seventeenth century on. Large-scale reindeer husbandry offered the Forest Saami culture unprecedented opportunities for affluence, while the Reindeer Saami constituted a small, ill-defined but, at least within the area of present-day Finland, influential Saami subculture defined mainly by its means of livelihood. History mentions several cases where a Forest Saami officially became a Reindeer Saami as he grew rich, and a Reindeer Saami became a Fishing or Forest Saami as he became impoverished. The official nomenclature primarily stems from the way the person in question was taxed. </P>
<P align="justify"> Pastoral reindeer herding possibly reached the area of present-day Finland around the Enontekiö-Muonio region in the seventeenth century. It can in any case be considered a general trend that reindeer stocks always declined towards the east while the ownership of reindeer become more democratic. There were far fewer persons who did not own reindeer outside the Reindeer Saami culture (mainly in Tornio Lapland) than in the area of large-scale reindeer husbandry proper. Another important difference was the milking of reindeer, which was a regular practice only among the Reindeer Saami, and which continued up to the Second World War. Moreover, outside the culture of the Reindeer Saami, i.e. outside the ecological forest area, reindeer have generally been allowed to roam freely in summer. In other words, fully pastoral reindeer herding seems to have spread as a relatively uniform cultural complex only to the open fells and lands with good access to the summer pastures of the arctic coast. </P>
<P align="justify"> The early nineteenth century saw the florescence of large-scale reindeer herding with all the cultural features still associated with the Reindeer Saami way of life. Stereotypically, this way of live can be described as a cycle in which families lived in a world of regular seasonal changes. Herding activities continued throughout the year, and the procedures depended on the seasonal rhythms of the reindeer. For example, in spring during the calving season, the females and males were herded separately, and in summer the herds were taken down to the Arctic coast and the islands to graze. Towards autumn they returned inland, and milking began in corals. At the turn of August and September, the herds were taken to the inland rutting grounds, and in the middle of winter to the winter pastures of the pine forest zone. </P>
<P align="justify"> The Saami reindeer herding culture also has its own reindeer village system, often called a siida. The reindeer village is a community made up of those persons who handle the herding activities together for most of the year, keep their reindeer in the same herd and use particular loosely inherited pastures. The composition of the reindeer villages was, and still is, flexible, depending on environmental conditions and internal factors within the social group. It was often formed on the basis of family relationships, or then a family relationship soon formed as a result of the herding work, which often brought together not only those who actually tended the same herd but also their families. </P>
<P align="justify"> The present-day Scandinavian reindeer herding area was shaped as a result of the demarcation of frontiers by Russia, Sweden and Denmark in the early nineteenth century. The actual starting point for the formation of present-day Scandinavia was the territorial demands made by Russia on Sweden in the Treaty of Hamina in 1809. The situation was a difficult one for the reindeer herders because they had to choose between retaining citizenship of their former mother countries or registering themselves as citizens of new states. In actual fact they were not forced to change their place of domicile until 1852, with the revocation of the Saami Codicil between Russia and Norway, which had been in force since 1751 and had guaranteed the Saami their ancient annual migration rights between the hinterland and the Arctic coast. Pasturing from Sweden on the Finnmark coast of Norway and Finland ended in 1888 when the right of pasturage was revoked within the territory of the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland for citizens of Sweden and vice versa. The Reindeer Saami of Norway and Sweden still had the right of passage through Finland, but conditions were made ever stricter until this prerogative, too, was finally revoked in the early twentieth century. As a consequence of these border closures, reindeer herding underwent a great upheaval, and reindeer pastures were redistributed. For example, numerous Reindeer Saami families moved away from the confined and exhausted pasturing grounds of Enontekiö to various other locations in Finnish Lapland at the end of the nineteenth century. Some took their caravans of reindeer as far south as Sieppijärvi, Yli-Tornio and Tervola, and some moved to Sompio in the municipality of Sodankylä.</P><BR><BR>
[[Table of contents: Means of livelyhood and transport|Table of contents: Means of livelyhood and transport]]<BR><BR>lyhood and transport]]<BR><BR> +
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