Teniky is a geological and archaeological site located in the Isalo Massif, a mountainous formation in Madagascar's southwestern Ihorombe region. It is situated in relative isolation and seclusion, over from the nearest coast. The site is notable for its unique rock-cut architecture, which is unlike any other found in Madagascar and the wider East African coast. The enigmatic complex spans nearly , and contains precise stone walls, quarries, terraces, niches, rock-cut boulders and stone basins.
Teniky is a geological and archaeological site located in the Isalo Massif, a mountainous formation in Madagascar's southwestern Ihorombe region. It is situated in relative isolation and seclusion, over from the nearest coast. The site is notable for its unique rock-cut architecture, which is unlike any other found in Madagascar and the wider East African coast. The enigmatic complex spans nearly , and contains precise stone walls, quarries, terraces, niches, rock-cut boulders and stone basins.
Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found at newly-discovered man-made structures at the site found them to date to the 10th–12th centuries CE. Shards of Chinese and Southeast Asian pottery found at Teniky date to the 11th–14th centuries CE. A 2024 study of the rock-cut niches at Teniky identified their closest architectural parallels as first-millennium Zoroastrian niches in Iran, particularly in the Fars region, suggesting that the site may have been a necropolis constructed by settlers of Zoroastrian origin.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).