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Brett Westwood learns that there is a lot more to our relationship with reindeer than Rudolph.

Reindeer have been entwined with the lives of people living in the most northerly parts of the world for thousands of years, following the herds north as the Arctic ice retreated. Karen Anette Anti from a long line of Sami herds-people and Tilly Smith with her herd of reindeer in the Scottish Highlands, teach Brett Westwood that there's a lot more to reindeer than Rudolph. In a programme also featuring reindeer expert Dr. Nicholas Tyler, Palaeolithic archaeologists Dr. Felix Riede and Dr George Nash.

Revised and shortened repeat.

Archive producer Andrew Dawes for BBC Audio Bristol

Available now

28 minutes

Last on

Sun 20 Dec 2020 06:35

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Tilly Smith

Reindeer have lived in the Cairngorms National Park since 1952, where the herd graze on over 10,000 acres upon the mountainsides. Tilly Smith first met the Cairngorm Reindeer in 1981 when she worked with the herd as a summer volunteer. She arrived as Elizabeth 'Tilly' Dansie but met Alan Smith and by 1983 they became a formidable team and managed the daily running of the Reindeer Company before eventually buying the business.

Dr Felix Riede

Felix Riede is faculty member of the Department of Culture and Society at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and the editor-in-chief of the Danish Journal of Archaeology and studies questions of environment, climate and cultural change.

He has written widely about reindeer-hunting communities and studies the first people to follow the reindeer from Southern Europe to the North towards the end of the last glacial period, around 15,000 years ago.

Dr George Nash

Dr George Nash is a part-time lecturer and visiting fellow at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, an Associate Professor at the Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania and at the Museum of Prehistoric Art in Macao, Portugal.

He has been a professional archaeologist for the past 23 years and has undertaken extensive fieldwork on prehistoric rock-art and mobility art in Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Sardinia, Spain and Sweden. Between 1994 and 1997 he directed excavations at the La Hougue Bie passage grave on Jersey, one of Europe’s largest Neolithic monuments and recently he has directed preliminary excavations at Westminster Hall, London.

Dr Nicholas Tyler

Nicholas Tyler is a biologist at the Arctic University of Norway, and has studied wild reindeer in Svalbard and semi-domesticated reindeer on mainland Norway since 1979.  He is interested in physiological adaptation to Arctic environment and in the processes that govern the ways in which individuals and populations respond to both natural and anthropogenic environmental change. <?xml:namespace prefix = "o" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Broadcasts

  • Tue 21 Nov 2017 11:00
  • Mon 27 Nov 2017 21:00
  • Sun 20 Dec 2020 06:35

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