Pendant

The Tellem, indigenous people who inhabited the Bandiagara Escarpment before the Dogon, made the pendant on display. The Dogon translated the term tellem as ‘the people who were first’ or ‘the man who was here before us’. The Dogon believe that when they left their ancestral homeland of Mande and came to the massif, they encountered a group of people they called Tellem. They then forced them to abandon their settlements and move to what is now Burkina Faso. The existence of the Tellem and their culture was confirmed during archaeological investigations carried out by the Dutch archaeologist Rogier M.A. Bedaux in the 1960s. Archaeologists believe that the Tellem led a hunter-gatherer economy because when they inhabited the massif (11th-15th century), there were forests rich in the game and plants in the area. When the Dogon came to the Tellem lands in the 15th century, they had a conflict. The Dogon, as an agricultural people, cut down the growing forests which provided food for the Tellem. Information about this dispute is still passed on by the Dogon in their oral tradition today: ‘When the Dogon came here, they disagreed with the Tellem. Our work was to cultivate the land while the Tellem were engaged in hunting, killing animals and eating them. We did not understand each other very well. They went away to Burkina'. Excavations by Dutch archaeologists confirm that the Tellem population had seriously declined by the turn of the 15th/16th century. It is evidenced by the smaller number of skeletons found in Tellem cemeteries dating to that period. It is believed that war expeditions of neighbouring countries and famines contributed to the decline. The precarious political and economic situation forced the Tellem to leave their homes and to abandon the Bandiagara Escarpment.

Katarzyna Findlik-Gawron