The Sikachi-Alyan petroglyphs were not the work of a single people or a single era. The site accumulated its imagery over thousands of years, with different groups returning to the same boulders to add their own marks. The oldest carvings — those depicting mammoths — belong to a world that no longer exists. Woolly mammoths were present in eastern Siberia and the Amur region until roughly 10,000 years ago; the people who carved them at Sikachi-Alyan were recording living animals, not mythological ones. Later additions show horses and elk, the changing fauna of a warming postglacial world, alongside shamanic figures and masks that suggest a cosmological dimension to what began as naturalistic record-keeping. The basalt itself helped preserve the images: harder than most rock types, it resists erosion better, though the annual flooding of the Amur continues to wear at exposed surfaces.

The village of Sikachi-Alyan is home to the Nanai people, one of the indigenous Tungusic groups of the Amur valley. The Nanai have fished and hunted this river for centuries, maintaining a culture built around its rhythms — the salmon runs, the seasonal flooding, the winter freeze. The petroglyphs predate the Nanai as a distinct cultural group, but the Nanai have long considered them part of their landscape and heritage. A small museum in the village covers Nanai shamanism, traditional material culture, and the petroglyphs themselves. The shamans depicted in the rock carvings connect across millennia to a spiritual tradition the Nanai maintained — in fragmented form — through Russian colonization, Soviet collectivization, and the displacement of indigenous communities that continued across much of the 20th century.

The petroglyphs had been known to local people long before any scientist documented them. The first formal scientific study was conducted in 1859 by Richard Maack, a Russian botanist and explorer who traveled extensively through Siberia and the Russian Far East during his career. Maack's documentation brought the Sikachi-Alyan site to the attention of the wider scientific world. The petroglyphs are now classified as federal-level cultural heritage monuments of Russia, a status that provides legal protection but cannot fully shield them from the Amur's annual floods, which periodically submerge and abrade the boulders. Some carvings that were legible in the 19th century are now difficult to read.

The petroglyphs divide into two distinct groups along the Amur bank. The lower group, downstream from the village, is more accessible and holds some of the most striking images: mammoth engravings, the shamanic figures, the mask grouping known as the Seven Sisters, and various spirals and abstract patterns. The upper group, upstream from the village, contains horses, elk, circles, geometric designs, and human silhouettes. Together they constitute an archive of human perception across 12,000 years — not a unified message, since they were made by different people across different eras, but a sustained conversation between humans and a river they all depended on. What the carvings have in common is their location: always near the water, always on the dark basalt boulders that emerge when the Amur recedes.