Aa fragmentary aluminium horseman, Mali, Dogon Country, collected in the N'Doulerie region, encrusted, oxidized patina. The Dogon peoples of Mali, particularly in the plateau and escarpment regions around N’Doulerie, are renowned for their highly symbolic wooden and metalsculpture, which interweaves social, cosmological, and ritual concerns. The horseman figure—a stylized representation of a mounted rider—epitomizes the Dogon emphasis on hierarchical authority, mobility, and spiritual mediation. Horsemen, though rarely employed in daily life due to ecological constraints, appear in Dogon sculpture as potent markers of status, martial prowess, and ancestral power. This sculpture, likely carved in local hardwood, exhibits the elongated proportions and geometric abstraction characteristic of Dogon figural art. The rider and horse are often reduced to essential forms, highlighting the relational and symbolic over the naturalistic. Such figures were frequently placed on shrines or family altars where they acted as intermediaries between the living and the ancestors, embodying social ideals and providing spiritual protection. The mounted figure, by virtue of its elevated posture, signals authority, mobility, and the capacity to traverse both terrestrial and spiritual domains. In the Dogon cosmology, horses and riders may also invoke notions of heroic ancestry and the maintenance of social order, reflecting historical memory and reinforcing communal hierarchies. The abstraction of the form allows the sculpture to function simultaneously as a mnemonic device and as a locus of ritual efficacy: it is activated through offerings, prayers, or ceremonial attention, integrating personal, familial, and collective concerns. As a Dogon artefact, the horseman sculpture exemplifies the fusion of aesthetic refinement, symbolic density, and ritual function, illustrating the complex ways in which material form mediates between human experience, ancestral presence, and the cosmological order. Informant Wassiu CAB36491