Emily Ruiz-Puerta

Emily is a PostDoc in the ArchHeritage project. This project is investigating the trade chains of three iconic heritage artefacts from the polar regions. Besides tracking oral history, it looks for new social and commercial developments and links them to historical lifestyles of herders and hunters.

The project traces the oral histories and new market and social entanglements of these artefacts across several sites in Sápmi, Canada, and Greenland, linking them to historical pastoralist and hunting lifeways and their transformation over time. In recent years, each artefact has taken a new form within the heritage and tourism industries:

1. reindeer antler as Traditional Chinese Medicine;
2. the conical tent as a fixed tourism dwelling;
3. and ivory as souvenir carvings.

Emily is working on the ivory part.

Emily also persued a PhD at the Arctic Centre. In her Phd thesis she addressed the significant gap in knowledge regarding the Atlantic walrus, a key species in Arctic history, by examining its genetic history and the human-walrus-environment interactions over time.

Staff page Emily Ruiz-Puerta