Small Shigir Idol was found during removal of peat in the territory of current Sverdlovsk Region in January of 1890.

Back in the middle of the 19th century, the Urals was seized by the gold rush. The miners were looking for gold deep under thick layers of peat, and often found historical artefacts together with the precious metal. After the miners started finding bony and bronze items, archeological excavations commenced in the region.

In ancient times people preferred to settle around water bodies. Eleven thousand years ago, there were several big lakes where the Shigir moors now are. So during the peat removal the remains of ancient man sites were found there. The first findings were displayed at the sci-tech exhibition of Siberia and the Urals, which took place in the early 20th century in Yekaterinburg. The excavations at Shigir peatlands lasted for several decades, and archeologists found many artifacts there. In 1951, Pavel Dmitriyev (one of the scholars) first wrote about a separate archeological culture – Shigir. According to his estimates, representatives of this culture left the banks of the local about two thousand years B.C.

Pagan idols reflected the beliefs of the indigenous people of the Urals. They preserved their traditions of shamanism and paganism until Russian discoverers came to these lands. After proliferation of Christianity in Siberia, the Urals social customs joined with Russian and European practices, which manifested itself in woodcarving and iconography of the 17th-19th centuries.