I. V. ASEEV Institute of Archeology and Ethnography SB RAS 17 Akademika Lavrentieva Ave., Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia E-mail: aseev@archaeology.nsc.ru Introduction As a certain worldview that emerged in primitive society, shamanism was closely connected with social and family life, expressing in a "vulgar", i.e. simplified, form the development of life. To understand how relevant its study is for historians, ethnographers, and folklorists, it is enough to refer to the index of literature "Buryat Shamanism" compiled by researchers of this religion T. M. Mikhailov and P. P. Khoroshnykh, which contains more than 500 names [1973]. Archaeological and ethnographic materials served as the basis for writing many works. One of the sources for studying the religious views of the Baikal people in the stone and metal eras are funeral rites and works of art, including small plastic objects from burials and sites, which are semantically explained in ethnographic information. But the most vivid spiritual world of the ancient population of the Baikal region, associated with religion, and in particular with shamanism, was manifested in petroglyphs distributed on the coastal rocks of the Angara, Lena, and Baikal. Many works have been devoted to their study, which address the problems of chronology and semantics, clarify the connection with local shamanic folklore, and trace a certain continuity between the ancient and modern populations of the Baikal region [Okladnikov, 1959, 1964, 1972, 1974, 1977; Okladnikov, Zaporizhia, 1959, 1972]. In recent years, archaeological research in the region has revealed another type of monuments - objects of a religious nature that have similarities with funerary structures and find analogies in petroglyphs and ethnographic materials. But due to their small number, they are poorly studied. Therefore, each new discovery of a cult character is of great scientific interest. The article is devoted to the analysis of such objects found at the Neolithic si ... Read more