In July of 1992, I was driving back along the road from a place called
Kalikol, which is in northern Kenya near the shores of Lake Turkana and
approximately 100km south of the Ethiopian and Sudanese borders.
I was headed toward the town of Lodwar.
Map here -
https://www.google.com/maps/place/3%...5.802778?hl=en
The local geography is desert. At one point during the drive I glanced out
to the side of the road and noticed an unusual formation of rocks up
a small hill.
I pulled over to investigate. I scrambled up the hill about 20m from the side
of the road and upon closer inspection there was a collection of more than
a dozen predominantly rectangular black basalt slabs that had been
intentionally planted into the ground. They sat within a mound of thousands
of smaller stones and were titled at various angles with respect the
vertical. See picture below.
It appeared to be an archaeological site and I was captivated by how
mysterious this arrangement of stones appeared to be.
I pondered whether it might have been a burial site. In any case, the
stones looked very old.
I knew people had lived in this area for a very long time. In fact,
this area was thought to be the very cradle of humanity.
Only a short way away on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana, Richard
and Meave Leakey had uncovered the remains of
Australopithecus anamensis,
a hominid who lived here 4.2 million years ago. Also the remains of
Homo habilis and
Homo erectus had been unearthed here.
Some ten years earlier I had been fortunate to be allowed access right
next to the stones at Stonehenge. These stones, by comparison, were
small compared to Stonehenge, only waist height.
I quickly shot some video on a tape camcorder and took a few 35mm transparencies.
Despite its remoteness with clear views for many miles around, this
was not a place to loiter. Only two days earlier there had been clashes
between the Turkana and Pokot tribes in the vicinity and some people
killed. It was the type of place where you drove down through a dry
creek bed and there in the middle of nowhere would be a lone naked
Turkana tribesman out hunting with a spear.
Shifta (bandits) with high-powered Toyota 4WD's and automatic rifles
who would come across from Sudan were always something you
were looking out for as well.
So without further ado, I scurried back down the hill and drove off.
These stones remained a mystery to me. Then yesterday, I was talking
to someone about Lake Turkana and I remembered the stones.
With the benefit of the Internet these days, I wondered if I could
find anything about them.
I found a 1978 paper by B.M Lynch and L.H Robbins of the Department
of Anthology of the Michigan State University entitled "
Namoratunga:
The First Archeoastronomical Evidence in Sub-Saharan Africa".
They named the site "Namoratunga II".
See
http://in-africa.org/wp-content/uplo...amoratunga.pdf
They believed the stones dated back to around 300 BC. By
making compass measurements and taking into account the
Earth's precession, they suggested that the stones acted as "pointers"
to seven "constellations" and stars including Triangulum, The Pleiades,
Aldeberan, Bellatrix and Sirius used by a civilization from Southern Ethiopia
called the Eastern Cushhites.
Lynch and Robbins suggested that the Cushhites had a sophisticated
calendar using these stars.
For half of the year they used the rising of particular stars in conjunction
with the New Moon to identify certain months. Triangulum was used in
conjunction with the phases of the Moon to determine months in the second
half of the year.
However, it appears that this interpretation of these stones has been controversial -
https://books.google.com.au/books?id...a%20II&f=false
Work by later archaeologists including from the NASA Ames Research
Center showed the compass bearings Lynch and Robbins had made in 1978
were affected by local magnetic stone.
Furthermore, even if the stones had been erected by the Cushhites,
some question the validity of our knowledge of how their calendar system
worked.
See -
http://www.chaz.org/Arch/Turkana/Nam...I_Kalokol.html
So these mysterious looking stones may remain mysterious for a long time
to come.
Below - poor quality screen capture of video tape I shot in 1992.
