Namoratunga II

Namoratunga II is a site of 19 magnetic (Soper 1982, Doyle and Wilcox 1986) stone pillars cut with 4 sides and a slanted top and petroglyphs on them.

Located near Lake Turkana in Kenya, Namoratunga means stone people in the local language. The site itself has not been dated, but similar petroglyphs at a burial site, Namoratunga I 100km to the south of it have caused archaeologists to give it the same date as that site - 300BC.

It was discovered by B.M. Lynch and L.H Robbins in1978 and later studied by many, including L.R Doyle and Soper R.

Lynch and Robbins put forth initial arguments that the pillars were astronomically aligned (Krupp, 1983 pg 170-171). Over the years the measurements and alignments of the pillars have been remeasured and reassessed. The pillars today are suggested to be aligned to the 7 stars of the Borana Calendar of the Cushite people whose positions in the sky mark the months when they rise at the same position on the horizon with the phrases of the moon. The seven stars or star groups in order are Triangulum, Pleiades, Aldebarran, Belletrix, Orion, Saiph, and Sirius. Soper,Doyle and Edward Frank found in an 1983 expedition to the site that there were "25 two-pillar alignments with the 300 B.C. eastern rising positions of the Borana calendar stars". To prove that the alignments were not random, they generated 10,000 random star alignments, and only 0.41% of them had 25 or more random alignments. Thus it seems highly unlikely that the alignments were random.

Find out more about the disputed Borana calendar here.