Melka Kunture
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How it came to be
Melka Kunture is a cluster of prehistoric sites in the upper Awash Valley of the Ethiopian Highlands, 2,000 to 2,200 metres above sea level and about 50 km by road south of Addis Ababa. Gerard Dekker found it in 1963, and Gérard Bailloud surveyed it in 1964.
More than 30 occupation sites have been found, dated by ash from eruptions of nearby Mount Zuqualla. Four successive phases, Oldowan, Acheulean, Middle Stone Age and Late Stone Age, are stacked in the strata, with fossils of Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and archaic Homo sapiens alongside stone tools, as well as fossil footprints. At Balchit, just under 7 km away, outcrops of obsidian supplied raw material from the earliest phases on.
Buried land surfaces and fossil fauna and flora under volcanic and river deposits allow reconstruction of a Pleistocene highland ecosystem and of how hominins adapted to it. Since 1999 an Italian mission led by Marcello Piperno of Sapienza University of Rome has worked there. The sites were inscribed in 2024 as Melka Kunture and Balchit.
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