Bandiagara Escarpment (Dogon cliff sites and Tellem caves)

The Bandiagara Escarpment is a natural sandstone cliff formation rising roughly 500 m above surrounding plains and extending approximately 150 km. The escarpment contains numerous cliff dwellings and burial caves once occupied by a people identified by the Dogon as the Tellem, who are believed to have arrived in the eleventh century A.D. and to have declined by the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, possibly due to drought-related famine and slave raids. The Dogon people succeeded the Tellem and continue to inhabit the Bandiagara region. Archaeological work in the cliff caves has recovered funerary material including textile items (notably preserved fiber 'cache-sexe' garments) and pottery, including three- and four-footed bowls found below burial caves. The preservation of textiles has been attributed to the favorable microclimatic conditions within the caves. Pottery distributions and forms have been interpreted in terms of funerary usage and wider West African trade and migration networks. The supplied sources are archaeological, ethnographic, and geographic in nature and do not report paranormal phenomena, named spirits, or hauntings associated with the sites. While the funerary context of many caves may give rise elsewhere to folklore about spirits, no such folkloric or supernatural claims are present in the provided materials.