Древнейшие шаманские атрибуты из Северного Приангарья
The Earliest Shamanic Attributes from the Northern Angara River Region

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyzes artefacts from the Late Neolithic child burial of the Ust-Zelinda-2 site (Ust-Ilimsk District, Irkutsk Region, Russia). Some features of the burial practice (burial in a pit, secondary burial, manipulation with a skull, burial with an animal) and a rather diverse set of grave goods allow to consider the grave as a complex with traces of a non-typical handling of child’s remains. The central place in the complex was given to a paddle carved from moose antler. It was placed in the “belly” area of the buried. Technical-technological analysis, wear traces as well as ethnographic examples of Siberian ritual attributes allow to consider it as a shamanic beater. Analysis of the position of the moose teeth in the burial suggests, hypothetically, the existence of another shamanic item - a tambourine, where teeth played the role of sound pendants, as well as allows to reconstruct its shape and dimensions. A research of internal features of ethnographic tambourines suggested an evolution line of sound pendants in tambourines from animal teeth to metal items. A complex analysis of all data defined the buried child as a person with special social status and the set of grave goods as the child’s heritage. At present time, this set of shamanic attributes is the earliest one in the Baikal Region and dates to the middle - the second part of IV Millennium BC.

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