The paddle was made on the territory of Mountain Shoria, in the area of habitation of the Shors. The bottom of the paddle is smooth. There are several triangular in section, transverse arises cut on the upper work surface. On one side, there is a terete handle. For grinding and shelling nuts out of pine cones they used two paddles: a base paddle and a working paddle. According to S.P. Shvetsov, a scholar of the Shors’ way of life, during the nut shelling, the worker sits on the smooth end of the bottom board, throws nut cones on the notches, which he grinds with the teeth of the other board, holding the latter with both hands.

The pine nut picking among the tribes of the Northern Altai arose as a trade in the era of Russian colonization in the first half of the 19th century. Its origin and development were due to the trading operations of Russian merchants who organized the sale of this valuable product. Before that, harvesting of pine nuts had been of small and purely consumer value in the Shors’ economy; however, the situation changed when there appeared merchant demand for pine nuts. Under the influence of market demand, the Shors began to harvest pine nuts. According to a 1900 survey, 31.5% of the Shor households along the Mrassu River was involved in pine nut picking, and along the Kondoma River – 28.2% of the households. Usually, for pine nut picking, whole families went to the taiga in September and lived there for about a month. Arriving in the intended area, they set up temporary dwellings, and the whole family was engaged in the nut harvesting. The technical methods of this trade were extremely primitive. All simple operations for the nut picking and primary processing were carried out using extremely simple and unpretentious wooden tools made on the spot upon arrival in the taiga and left in the taiga at the end of work. Men knocked down pine cones, hitting the tree trunk with a large wooden mallet set on a long handle. Alternatively, the harvesters climbed the pines and knocked down the cones with the help of a long pole, which allowed them to get at the nearby trees as well. Women and children gathered down the fallen cones and carried them in birch-bark boxes over their shoulders to the camp, where they heaped them up. In such a crowded state, the cones lay for several days, then they were processed. Initially, they were ground on wooden graters (paspak), which are short wooden boards covered with notches. With graters, the nut was removed from the cone, and then sifted out, poured into sacs and taken home.