Namoratunga

The site and the 1978 claim

Namoratunga is a set of standing stones in Turkana country, west of Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. At the site often called Namoratunga II, 19 basalt pillars stand in rows.

In 1978 the archaeologists B. Mark Lynch and Lawrence Robbins argued in Science that the pillars were not placed at random. They reported that lines through them point to the rising places of seven stars and star groups, among them the Pleiades and Sirius, the same ones the Borana Oromo use to name the months of their calendar. They dated the site to about 300 BCE and concluded that a calendar based on detailed knowledge of the stars was in use in eastern Africa more than two thousand years ago. They called it the first archaeoastronomical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa.

The doubts

The claim drew criticism quickly:

• In 1982 the archaeologist Robert Soper questioned whether the pillars had any astronomical purpose (Azania).
• In 1986 Laurance Doyle and Thomas Wilcox tested the alignments statistically, asking whether they were stronger than chance (Azania).
• The archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles, reviewing the Borana calendar, questioned the link between the calendar and the Namoratunga pillars.
• The age is also in question. Pillar sites around Lake Turkana have since been studied in detail. At Lothagam North, a team led by Elisabeth Hildebrand showed in 2018 that the pillars mark a communal cemetery built by the region's first herders between about 5,000 and 4,300 years ago (Max Planck Institute). An older radiocarbon date from a pillar site near Kalokol has likewise been used to question the 1978 reading. A 2025 paper by Asfaw Beyene argues again that Namoratunga II was an observatory and gives an earlier radiocarbon date, but this has not yet been tested by other specialists.

Why it is labeled Debated

The pillars are real and old, and the Borana calendar is real and still in use. Whether this monument was built to watch the stars of that calendar has not been shown to most specialists' satisfaction. The wider pillar-site tradition around Lake Turkana is remarkable in its own right: it shows early herders working together to build lasting monuments for their dead.