The article deals with the issues of general theoretical nature related to the problem of determining local cultural traditions. The processes of settling the forest-steppe Altai by the tribes of the Kulaiskaya archaeological culture, which laid the basis for the formation of the Altai variant of the culture, have been briefly characterized. The settlement began in the 4th-3d centuries BC with the infiltration of small groups of the population of the Novosibirsk variant of the Kulaiskaya culture into the local environment, then it was followed by migration flows of representatives of the Sarovskii stage of the Kulaiskaya culture from the territories of the Tomsk Ob region at the end of the 2nd century BC, which led to a change in the culture of the aboriginal population. The formation of the Altai variant of the Kulaiskaya culture took place on the basis of cultural interaction of the alien Kulaiskaya culture population of the Sarovskii stage with the local population belonging to the Staroaleiskaya and Kamenskaya cultures, which led to the appearance of sites of the final Fominskii stage. Chronological line of the turning points of the local cultural traditions (2nd century AD) has been determined in the article. It characterizes the main features of the funeral and memorial rites of the new population that can be considered local from that moment. Those traditions can be seen as basic, the sources of further development and transformation of funeral and memorial traditions of the forest-steppe Altai throughout the 1st millennium.