The Tellem

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In a handful of dry caves high in a sandstone cliff in central Mali, things survived that have no business surviving in West Africa. Cotton cloth, checked in indigo blue and undyed white, folded around the dead or still worn on them. Wooden headrests and carved figures, iron bracelets, quartz lip-plugs, plaited fiber, leather, beads, and pots. And the dead themselves — in one cave close to a thousand of them, laid up in the rock across the eleventh and twelfth centuries and never washed away, never rotted, never dug over by a later town. Almost everywhere else in the western Sudan the medieval centuries left nothing a hand can hold; the wet season and the termites and the endless reuse of the ground see to that. Here, behind a lip of stone the rains never reached, a whole inventory of made things waited. The people who made it were gone before the cliff had a name for them. When their successors climbed the escarpment and found the sealed chambers overhead, they called the vanished tenants tellem — we found them.

Tellem structures set into the Bandiagara rock face, with a man of 1.85 m standing among them for scale. The small chambers and their placement high in the vertical stone fed the Dogon tradition that the Tellem were a people of short stature able to reach where no one now can. Timm, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The name and the trove

The Tellem reach the record twice, and the two ways of reaching it do not quite meet. One is a name; the other is a trove. Neither is the people’s own account of themselves, because no such account survives — no Tellem word, no Tellem telling, nothing they said about who they were. What is left is what others called them and what the caves preserved of what they made.

The name is not theirs. Tellem is a Dogon word, usually translated we found them, or, a little more loosely, those who were before us. It is the term the Dogon gave to the people they encountered already living high in the cliffs of Bandiagara when they migrated in from the Mande country to the west, traditionally in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the Dogon telling the Tellem are the prior tenants of the escarpment, a people of the rock face who left behind their round mud granaries — some of which the Dogon still climb to and use — and their dead sealed in the caves. Tradition holds them to have been small in stature, and able to lodge their dwellings and their stores in cracks and ledges so high in the vertical stone that no later hand could reach them. Their tapering cliff granaries and their cave-tombs are part of the sacred topography the Dogon inherited rather than raised, a landscape read as closely as a text, in which the ancestors of a people no one remembers hang permanently above the living. So the Tellem enter the world’s knowledge first as a category in someone else’s memory: the ones who were here first.

The trove is the second way, and it is the one that puts a chronology under the name. Because the arid, sheltered caves kept organic material that rots to nothing in the West African climate, the Tellem can be recovered from the stuff itself. The reconstruction is chiefly the work of Dutch scholars. In January 1964 an expedition set out from Rotterdam on a seven-thousand-kilometer overland drive to the escarpment, led by the architect and amateur archaeologist Herman Haan, who lived from 1914 to 1996, in company with Rogier M. A. Bedaux, Gerard Jansen, and Ton Hosemans. To work the burial caves that hung out of reach in the cliff, Haan designed a metal cage that could be lowered down the rock face. What began as a short reconnaissance grew into a campaign of excavations that ran in several seasons across 1964, 1965, 1966, 1971, and 1974, and it was Bedaux above all who turned the finds into a history. His stratigraphic and architectural study, published as “Tellem, reconnaissance archéologique d’une culture de l’Ouest africain au Moyen Âge” in the Journal de la Société des Africanistes in 1972, and his later work with the textile scholar Rita Bolland on the cave cloth, replaced a Dogon oral category with a dated, material culture.

That material lays out a sequence. The Tellem occupied the Bandiagara Escarpment from roughly the eleventh to the sixteenth century of the common era. They were not the first on the cliff. They succeeded a still earlier and far more shadowy people, the Toloy, known almost entirely from granaries built of superimposed coils of clay — a technique unlike anything used after them — found in a rocky gully near Sanga that gave the vanished people their name. Radiocarbon dates place the Toloy granaries astonishingly deep, in about the third and second centuries before the common era. Between the Toloy and the Tellem lies a long dark interval the excavations cannot light. After the Tellem came the Dogon, and with them the region became Dogon country. Three peoples, then, stacked in time on one wall of stone, and only the middle one — the cliff-builders of the medieval centuries — left behind the extraordinary cache that makes it possible to say anything concrete about how such a people lived.

What the caves kept

Set the tradition of small climbers to one side and the archaeology draws an ordinary, capable farming people. The Tellem lived by hoe-farming and by keeping animals, and they rounded that out with fishing, with gathering from the bush, and with hunting by bow. They built their dwellings and their honeycombed granaries out of ochre-colored mud, some of it worked from the earth of termite mounds, packing the small chambers into the cliff face and around its foot. The granaries were round and tapered, sealed cells for grain; the tombs were the caves themselves, and the Tellem placed their dead high, well above the plain, beyond the reach of the flash floods that scour the flats below the escarpment in the rains. The choice was deliberate and it was also, in the long run, a gift: it put the dead somewhere dry, somewhere stable, somewhere no river would ever disturb.

One cave, used as a graveyard, held on the order of a thousand skeletons, laid up across the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The physical remains, studied over the long campaign, pointed to a single population with consistent measurements maintained across some five centuries on the cliff — not a churn of newcomers, but one people, persisting. The dead were treated with care. They were sometimes interred in the clothes they had worn and sometimes wrapped in a blanket, and their grave goods differed by sex; among the objects were wooden headrests of a kind Bedaux noted do not turn up in later Dogon contexts, one of the small, telling differences that let the excavators sort the pre-Dogon layer from what came after. As new burials were added, earlier bones were gathered and moved aside to make room, so that a single cave accumulated its thousand over generations. The cliff-villages the Dogon later built at the foot of the escarpment — tiered places like Ireli — sit directly beneath these tombs, the medieval dead lodged in the rock above the living to this day.

The truly extraordinary thing the Tellem preserved, though, is preservation itself. Their caves are among the very few places in all of West Africa where medieval cloth survived at all, and the cloth is the heart of the trove. The Dutch team recovered around five hundred textiles from some thirteen burial contexts in the cliff, and radiocarbon dating spread them across the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries — the earliest fragments, from one cave, reaching back to the eleventh, the latest overlapping the first Dogon cloth of the fifteenth and sixteenth. Almost three-quarters of the cotton cloths belong to the first two centuries of that span. The textiles are finely spun cotton, some left in its undyed white, much of it patterned in checks and stripes with thread dyed blue — presumably indigo, and among the oldest surviving indigo-dyed cloth in the region. The forms are those of clothed people: cotton tunics and caps woven on the narrow strip loom still worked across West Africa today, rectangular wrappers and mantles, and blankets. Where everywhere else the loom-work of the medieval Sudan has decayed past recovery, in the Tellem caves a whole dressed population is legible — what they wore, how it was cut, how it was dyed and checked and striped. A vanished textile economy, readable from tombs.

That the cloth is tailored is itself worth pausing on. The strip loom produces narrow bands, a hand or so wide, which must then be cut and sewn edge to edge to make anything large; the Tellem tunics and wrappers are pieced garments, joined and shaped, not lengths thrown over the shoulder. The checks and stripes were planned in the setting-up of the loom, the blue thread laid in to fall where the weaver meant it. This is skilled, deliberate work, an established craft rather than a first experiment, and it is the deliberateness that made the caves rewrite the timeline: not that cotton existed on the cliff in the eleventh century, but that by then its weaving and dyeing were already mature.

The rest of the cache fills the picture in. Iron bracelets and other ironwork speak to smithing; quartz lip-plugs and beads to adornment; plaited fiber and basketry, leather, and pottery to the ordinary furniture of a household. Women wore ornaments of braided fiber. None of it is monumental. The Tellem raised no temples, cut no inscriptions, left no city. Their whole legacy is domestic and mortuary — grain stores, grave cloth, headrests, the small metal and stone a person carries — and it survives precisely because it was tucked into dry rock and left alone. It is a rare thing in African archaeology: not the durable residue of the powerful, but the perishable belongings of an unremarkable farming people, kept by accident of climate.

The two afterlives

The Tellem entered wide awareness through two channels that pulled in opposite directions.

The first was the Dutch campaign itself, and it was, for its moment, a sensation. Herman Haan had contacts at the broadcaster NCRV, and through them the 1964 expedition drew weekly coverage on Dutch national television, so that millions followed the drive across the Sahara and the descent into the caves week by week. What came out of that campaign was not spectacle but a genuine correction to the historical record. Bedaux and Bolland’s study of the cave textiles, gathered in Bolland’s 1991 catalog Tellem Textiles: Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s Bandiagara Cliff, showed that cotton weaving and dyeing in the western Sudan were centuries older than historians had supposed. The dated Tellem cloth pushed the local mastery of the strip loom and the indigo vat back into the first half of the second millennium, and made the caves the anchor for the early history of West African textiles. That recovery is broadly agreed on, and it rests on excavated, datable material — on radiocarbon and stratigraphy rather than on interpretation.

The distinction matters, because the escarpment is also home to the most famous and most contested body of interpretation in African ethnography. The elaborate Dogon esoteric cosmology that made the region renowned — the creator Amma and the ordered water-spirits, the egg of the world and the tale of the pale fox — reaches the world chiefly through the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule and his collaborator Germaine Dieterlen, and their grand synthesis has been sharply questioned since Walter van Beek’s 1991 restudy found that ordinary Dogon did not recognize much of it. From that same Griaule material was later spun the notion that the Dogon held ancient knowledge of an invisible companion to Sirius, a claim regarded as spurious and treated as a problem in the history of ideas rather than a fact about the sky. The Tellem story stands apart from all of that. It is an archaeological story, made of cloth and bone and pottery a carbon date can pin, and it neither depends on the disputed cosmology nor supplies it with evidence. The caves are older than the questions asked about the Dogon, and indifferent to them.

The second channel ran the other way, into the market. Because the dry caves had preserved wooden figures where wood does not otherwise last, Tellem became a category among collectors and dealers of African art. Sculptures with an eroded, deeply patinated surface and arms raised overhead circulated as ancestral to Dogon carving, prized for their apparent age and their weathered, encrusted look. The attribution is often uncertain: telling a genuinely Tellem figure from an early Dogon one, or from a later piece aged in a shrine, is a matter of real dispute, and the label on the market is looser than the label in the excavation report. What the two channels share is the same physical fact — that this cliff, and almost nowhere else, kept wood and cloth and leather intact for the better part of a millennium — turned once toward history and once toward the saleroom.

A Tellem wooden figure, arms raised, in the Musée du quai Branly, Paris. The dry caves preserved carvings that made ‘Tellem’ a category on the art market, though attributing a given figure to the Tellem rather than to early Dogon carvers is often uncertain. Ji-Elle, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The landscape that holds the caves has its own standing. In 1989 the escarpment was inscribed as the UNESCO mixed World Heritage site “Cliff of Bandiagara (Land of the Dogons)”, a cultural and natural property running some 150 kilometers along the cliff and rising about 500 meters above the plains. The listing names the Tellem and the Dogon together: the ancient granaries and burial caves set high in the rock, and below and around them the living Dogon villages with their granaries, altars, and men’s meeting-shelters. The Tellem occupy the deep register of that heritage — the earliest legible hand on the wall after the Toloy, the makers of the high chambers that give the cliff its stacked, tiered look.

The living custodians of the sites are the Dogon, and their situation is grave. Since 2012 the Bandiagara region has been caught up in the wider insurgency across Mali and, with it, in intercommunal violence between Dogon and Fulani communities — among its worst episodes the 2019 Ogossagou massacre — which has emptied the escarpment of the tourism it once drew and has put the villages that keep the Tellem caves in real danger. The Tellem themselves left the cliff long ago; tradition and reconstruction hold that as the Dogon settled in, the Tellem withdrew southward toward the borderlands of Mali and Burkina Faso, whether driven off, absorbed by intermarriage, or simply thinned to nothing over generations, no one can now say. What they did not take with them was the trove. It is still there, high in the sealed rock — the cotton and the headrests and the thousand dead — kept dry above a country that has grown perilous for the people who live beneath it, and legible, five and more centuries on, in a way the medieval West African plain never allowed anyone else to be.

→ Related: Amma · Nommo · Lebe · Yurugu · Andumbulu · Bandiagara · Sanga · Songo · Ireli · The Dogon · The Bambara