digital photograph(colour)
- Museum number
- 2013,2034.13615
- Description
-
Digital photograph (colour); view of engraved pecked rock art showing multiple pecked lines and shapes on flat rock surface. Top to bottom: multiple scratched and pecked lines separated by cracks in the rock; five vertical lines intersecting with two horizontal lines with arched line to left and four parallel short vertical lines to left of this; two parallel horizontal lines separated by line of parallel dots, with further line of larger dots to lower right; thirteen gently arching, fine parallel horizontal ines, intersected by longest vertical line that crosses whole rock and another, shorter, at left, with bisected circle shapes at centre. Right of this at right of image are two long vertical lines running from top to bottom of rock surface, leftmost crossed by multiple short parallel horizontal lines. Three vertical lines joined at top are cut off at base of image. A 10cm scale has been fitted at the bottom of the image. Namoratung'a, Kenya.
Born digital
- Production date
- 06 March 2009
- Dimensions
-
File size: 8.56 megabytes
-
Resolution: 300 dots per inch
- Curator's comments
-
Detail of 2013,2034.13608.
-
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
- 2013,2034.13615
- Additional IDs
-
Previous owner/ex-collection number: KENLOK0040055 (TARA number)