digital photograph(colour)
- Museum number
- 2013,2034.13613
- Description
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Digital photograph (colour); view of engraved pecked rock art showing multiple pecked lines and shapes on flat rock surface. Top (left to right): horizontal oblong shape with line of dots within and multiple vertical lines emanating from top, top of long vertical line crossed by multiple short parallel horizontal lines that stretches to bottom of rock surface, another long vertical line, unfilled circle. Centre (left to right): oblong cut off edge of image at left, two bisected circle shapes, several short vertical and horizontal lines, centre part of long lines noted above, shorter vertical line crossed with horizontal lines, vertical oblong divided by eleven vertical lines. Bottom (left to right): vertical rectangle bisected vertically, bottom section of vertical lines noted above, vertical oblong bisected vertically. Namoratung'a, Kenya.
Born digital
- Production date
- 06 March 2009
- Dimensions
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File size: 8.42 megabytes
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Resolution: 300 dots per inch
- Curator's comments
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Detail of 2013,2034.13608.
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The archaeological sites at Namoratung’a consist of engraved rock art on stones and upright slabs surrounding graves, and covers three separate sites near Lokori to the South-West of the West shore of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya. The two southern sites were first investigated and published by archaeologist Robert Soper in the late 1960s, and by Mark Lynch and Larry Robbins in the 1970s. At the centre of one of the southern sites are 167 burials surrounded by circles of massive upright stones, often engraved with over 170 different motifs. Excavations revealed single internments of all ages and both sexes, with Radiocarbon dates from between the mi- first century BC and the mid-first millennium AD. A smaller similar site lies about 1 km North. 170km north of these, near Kalokol by the shore of the lake, is the third site, first investigated by Lynch and Robbins. The site has a number of basalt pillars, the alignment of which has been proposed to be archaeoastronomical. The similarities of the geometric motifs on the rocks at the Namoratung’a sites and family lineage markers used as cattle brands among local Turkana people has also been debated.
The Turkana Basin covers about 131,000km² in Northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia and forms part of the Eastern (Gregory) Rift Valley. At its centre is the long Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) and the area is renowned in Palaeontology due to the richness of early hominid finds there.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2013
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- 2013,2034.13613
- Additional IDs
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Previous owner/ex-collection number: KENLOK0040053 (TARA number)