Magdalenian at Altamira

Once plant and animal life recovered in a warming climate, the Homo sapiens population more than quadrupled in Europe. A new culture appeared in France and Spain about 17,000 years ago. Magdalenians’ shared technology and their iconographic system reflected "an underlying cultural unity" that suggested "the circulation of traditions on a vast scale in time and space."

Their symbols appeared on both portable and immovable objects. Most sites had one or the other. Altamira, 20 miles west of Santander, was one of the few in Cantabria with both. It was also one of the few caves with both art and evidence of habitation.

Margaret Conkey noted 27 places in northern Iberia engraved bone or antler. Many adorned tools or points. Altamira was one of five where more than 10 artifacts have been found. Those five shared six design elements organized by one of three structural principles. Only two had unique motifs: Altamira and Cueto de la Mina. She believed that marked them as centers of innovation where groups may have gathered.

The earliest sign on a wall at Altamira was some black marks that have been dated to 16,480 years ago. A turtle-like profile or tectiform goes back 15,400 years. Both were found in a terminal gallery.

Another form of portable art was carved or painted limestone tablets or non-utilitarian bones. At Altamira and El Castillo left engraved heads of female red deer on both shoulder blades and walls. The shoulder blade at Altamira has been dated to 14,480 years ago. Paul Bahn and Jean Vetut believed the two incised bones were either the work of "the same person, or two who knew each other’s work." One had either seen the other’s work, or been trained by someone trained in much the way workshops or studios functioned in later European art.

The progression from artisans working independently within a shared tradition to artists working within a school is more obvious in the images left on cave walls. Early in the period, images were executed near the mouths of caves, sometimes just beyond the farthest point reached by daylight. At Altamira, the opening was the only area with hearths.

Jean Clotttes noted there came a time in the mid-Magdalenian period when people explored caves. They may have been aided by improvements in their stone lamps that burned animal fat. Art began appearing in large internal caverns and in remote passages assessable by few.

At Altamira an 60 by 30 foot ceiling was painted in stages on an area The height of the chamber varied from 3.8 to 8.7 feet. One large bison was added 14,820 years ago, another twenty years later. A small bison was painted 13,570 years ago. They first were engraved on the wall, then outlined in back. The bodies were colored in shades of red and brown. The same techniques appeared earlier at Lascaux, in the French Dordogne, and later at El Castillo.

Clottes noted, when archaeologists tried to replicate their techniques, they discovered it was difficult to find walls that met their requirements. They needed to be large and smooth and relatively unmarred by calcite dripping from the ceiling.

Artists incorporated irregularities in the walls into their art. Nodules and depressions were exploited to give dimension to animals. At Altamira, Bahn and Vetut noted, all the bison on the ceiling were on convex surfaces, while the horses and deer were on concave. Rough textures also were incorporated into the bison.

The sensitivity to the contours of walls may have been more than an aesthetic sensibility. It may have been a consequence of special attitudes towards rock that had manifested themselves in the Aurignacian with hand stencils. Such stencils continued to be made at Altamira, along with hand prints.

Most of the pigments were mineral based. Ochre was still the primary colorant, used for reds and browns. Chemists have determined artists experimented to discover the best source for black. At Altamira they used two types of manganese, pine or juniper charcoal, and charred remains of burned bone. Anthropologists found some white paste in a shell made from mica and illite.

Some pigments were used in sticks and some were powdered. The latter may have been turned into paste. André Leroi-Gourhan said, experiments showed water was the most effective binder, either in the pastes or in the dampness of the walls. Cave water would have been rich in calcium. At Altamira, powdered fossil amber was used.

Notes: For more on population numbers see post for 22 November 2015. All dates are given by scientists with ranges; I’ve simplified them here.

Bahn, Paul G. and Jean Vertut. Journey Through the Ice Age, 1997. He gives the following dates for the bison at El Castillo: 13,570, 13,060, and 12,910 years ago.

Clottes, Jen and David Lewis Williams. The Shamans of Prehistory, translated by Sophie Hawkes, 1998.

Conkey, Margaret W. "The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira [and Comments and Reply]," Current Anthropology 21:609-630:1980. The other Cantabrian sites she used were El Cierro, El Juyo, and La Paloma.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. The Dawn of European Art, translated by Sara Champion, 1982; quotation in the first paragraph.

Graphics: Rameessos, "Reproduction of a Bison of the Cave of Altamira," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 25 December 2008.

Solutrean in Cantabria

Scientists now think the great ice ages of the past were caused by regular modifications in the location of the Earth’s elliptical orbit and one resulted in less summer solar radiation in the northern latitudes around 23,000 years ago. That in turn lead to progressively less ice being melted each year, which in turn nurtured the expansion of ice sheets.

The northern ice sheets began shrinking about 19,000 years ago when changes in the sun’s angles led to more heat in the summer. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet was affected between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago. Both led to increases in sea levels. The middle and late Solutrean fell between these two events.

Ironically, the first warming in France and Iberia led to worse conditions. If you think back to the changes in the Nebraska prairies in the 1930s, mentioned in the post for 28 January 2016, you realize that when the rains returned in 1938, bluestem could reclaim land on its western frontier lost to western wheatgrass. Wheatgrass, however, could not compensate for its lost range by returning farther west because that area had been devastated.

Similarly, the ranges of grasses that fed reindeer, horses and red deer would have changed, and likely shrunk. The humans dependent on them would have had to adapt to fewer or smaller animals.

Bands apparently moved south along the coastal plain of the Bay of Biscay bypassing the Pyrenees to the east. The lightest area in the map below would have been exposed. The large estuary up the French coast is the mouth of the Garonne river. Many of the early Solutrean sites are in its upstream valleys.

In Cantabria, the earliest evidence from El Mirón has been dated 19,230 years ago. It was located on the Río Asón between Balboa and Santander, in the second indentation from the east on the map. The earliest Solutrean date for La Riera was 19,820 years ago. It sat on the limestone La Llera ridge between Santander and Oviedo, somewhere in the shallow indentation, about 70 miles west of El Mirón.

Steven Mithen said La Riera was a treeless landscape where bands hunted red deer and ibex. Lawrence Straus was told the only tree growing at El Mirón was Scots pine. The most common herbaceous plants were in the wild lettuce group of the composite family. He argued, that with the increasing population in the area, bands began foraging for mollusks along the shore in winter.

The climate improved at bit by 18,890 years ago, when birch trees and members of the heath family appeared at El Mirón. The newer Solutrean tool forms were found for the first time: an antler sagaie and two unifacial points with possible shoulders. The next layer higher had a bifacial willow leaf. The antler throwing spear was "‘decorated’ with parallel, oblique engraved lines."

Some semblance of social life returned by 17,420 years ago. La Cueva de Chufín saw its cave art revived. Earlier artists had made red outlines of figures and dots. Now, they left engravings of deer, bison, aurochs, and horses with more abstract patterns.

Although portable art like the incised spear was more common in the Solutrean period than cave art, someone engraved a deer on a wall at Altamira around 18,000 years ago. Later, people left hand prints and simple outlines of horses and goats. Francisco Jordá Cerdá documented Cueva de La Pasiega where he saw outlines and figures painted in red. Archaeologists found 25 painted figures at El Castillo.

Straus believed bands spent most of their time in coastal sites that were close to sources for shellfish and fish. The caves were all in sheltered locations, with their entrances alee to the winds.

From their coastal locations, Straus argued, groups moved up adjacent river valleys to hunting areas that often overlooked "gorges, passes, box canyons" used by animals moving between high and low pastures. These high hunting locations were often so windy and uncomfortable they wouldn’t have been used for long time periods.

Straus thought pairs of coastal and montane sites represented group territories, and that each was associated with a ritual center. Near the coast, La Cueva de Chufín was east of La Riera. Altamira and El Castillo were both about 30 miles west of Santander on neighboring rivers. Cueva de La Pasiega was upriver from El Castillo.

Notes: The wild lettuce group is the liguliflora section of Composite family. Paleobotanists often can’t distinguish pollens and other plant remains below groups levels.

Bahn, Paul G. and Jean Vertut. Journey Through the Ice Age, 1997; on Altamira paintings and El Castillo.

Clark, Peter U., et alia. "The Last Glacial Maximum," Science 325:710-714:2009.

Gálvez Lavín, Nerea. "Chufín (Riclones, Rionansa)," Universidad de Cantabria Arte en Cantabria web site

Hays J.D., J. Imbrie, and N. J. Shackleton. "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages," Science 194:1121-1132:1976.

Jordá Cerdá, Francisco. "Los Estilos en el Arte Parietal Magdaleniense Cantábrico," in Universidad de Zaragoza, Curso de Arte Rupestre Paleolítico, 1978; cited by Wikipedia.

Mithen, Steven. After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC, 2006.

Straus, Lawrence Guy. "Cantabria and Vascongadas, 21,000-17,000 B.P.: Toward a Solutrean Settlement Pattern," Munibe 31:195-202:1979.

_____. "On Maritime Hunter-Gatherers: A View from Cantabrian Spain," Munibe 33:171-173:1981.

_____, F. Bernaldo de Quirós, V. Cabrera, and G. Clark. "New Radiocarbon Dates for the Spanish Solutrean," Antiquity 51:243:1977.

_____, _____, _____, _____. "Solutrean Chronology & Lithic Variability in Vasco-Cantabrian Spain," Zephyrvs 28-29:109-112:1978.

_____, Manuel R. González Morales, Igor Gutiérrez Zugasti and María Jose Iriarte Chiapusso. "Further Solutrean Evidence in El Mirón Cave (Ramales de la Victoria, Cantabria)," Munibe 31:195-202:1979

Turner, Kernan. "Altamira Cave Art in Spain Is Being 'Cloned' for Visitors," Associated Prees, published 13 August 2000 by Los Angeles Times; on Altamira engraving.

Graphics: Eric Gaba, English translation of "Carte Bathymétrique de la Mer Celtique et du Golfe de Gascogne," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 1 July 2014.

Last Glacial Maximum

The relative warmth that nurtured the Gravettian began disappearing about 33,000 years ago when Europe’s glaciers began expanding. They reached their maximum extent 26,5000 years ago. The vast ice sheets remained stable until 19,000 years ago when sea levels began rising.

The growth rate in the Homo sapiens population didn’t change, according to Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and his colleagues. What did change was those people were compressed into a smaller area. In Cantabrian Spain, Lawrence Straus noted 18 sites have been located for the Aurignacian era, and 33 in the last glacial maximum. That wasn’t simply a doubling of density: the 18 were spread over 15,000 years while the 33 ranged over 3,000 years.

Simple arithmetic suggests that was one site every 100 years. However, while many locations may have been used only once, La Riera had twenty layers of human occupation. Carbon fragments have been dated to 16,420 years ago in layer 11 of the Asturian cave, to 16,900 years ago in layer 13, and to 17,010 years ago in layer 18. Roughly 240 years or 12 generations passed between each visit between layers 11 and 13. Earlier, bands had stopped there every 55 years.

The scale of human adjustment to climatic change was still vast. Fifty-five years represented more than two 20-year generations. Each stop was a new discovery.

It’s hard to know from marine isotopes if the onset of cold, drought and winds was gradual, sudden, or fluctuated. What we’re learning from global warming today is there can be a long period when undetected changes slowly accumulate that result in sudden cataclysms like the calving of ice sheets.

Before the drought of the 1930s, the western and central parts of Nebraska had different communities of grass. The one was a mixture of tall and short grasses, the other was dominated by blue stem. When the rains failed year after year, western wheat grass took blue stem’s place. The lower-growing blue grama and buffalo grass came with it. In some places, side oats grama became dominant.

While the western mixed prairie was moving east, the west slowly died. First the grass stubble shattered, exposing perennial root crowns to wind and sun. When they died, the remaining mulch of dead leaves blew away, and the lichens and mosses that build soil died. Winds left dirt where once there’d been organic soil.

That transition occurred quickly. The summer of 1933 had been dry. The rains failed in 1934. John Weaver was describing the transformation in 1939 - five years later.

One can take this as an analogy for the process of glacial expansion. Within five years, a 300-mile-wide stretch of land had been altered, its vegetation transformed in the east, destroyed in the west.

By modern calculations, it’s a tad under 400 miles from Ulm near the center of the Aurignacians in Swabia to Mâcon, near a Solutrean center in France. Solutré is item 12 on the map below.

It’s more than 400 miles from Ulm to the Gravettian centers in Moravia. The combined distances are four times the span of change in Nebraska.

It’s unlikely everything happened within a generation. More than likely, some dry years that modified the vegetation alternated with a few years that had enough rain to maintain a status quo. During each dry spell, the line of vegetation moved a little, followed by the animals that depended on it. To the rear, more land was abandoned by Nature.

At the same time the climate was becoming drier, it also was becoming colder. Françoise Delpech noted the horse was the faunal equivalent to side oats grama and western wheatgrass. It adapted "faster than any other species to the most diversified conditions, even the most severe."

Everyone and everything was on the move. At some point, refugees from central Europe must have realized they were being pulled away from their base camps and were becoming more transient, perhaps able to settle for a while in one area, then forced to move again.

There was little they could take with them, beyond their mental attitudes. They were having to adapt every year to changing conditions.

The one thing they maintained was an appreciation for bone as a fuel and implement. Their mental agility would have been reinforced as their constantly changing locations were dictated more by the availability of food rather than by natural resources like flint or burnable trees.

A new technology, the Solutrean emerged about 22,000 years ago in France. The stone points were an adaption of an old insight to a new need. Instead of using a harder rock to chip a form from flint, they used bone or wooden tools to dislodge slivers. Technically the change was from percussion to pressure.

Solutrean techniques spread west to the rivers flowing into the Bay of Biscay. Carbon remains from Laugerie Haute in the Dordogne have been dated to 20,890 years. That’s in the general area of item 9 on the map.

At the same time people from the north and east were moving towards one of the refuges in the south, people in those areas were moving farther south with their particular biomes. Solutrean points have been dated to 21,710 at Les Mallaetes and to 20,170 at Parpalló. Both caves in Valencia are near item 4 on the map.

Notes: Bocquet’s group’s calculations were described in the post for 22 November 2015. The distance from Lincoln, Nebraska to Holyoke, Colorado is 335 miles by interstate 80E.

Clark, Peter U., et alia. "The Last Glacial Maximum," Science 325:710-714:2009.

Delpech, Françoise. "Biostratigraphy of the Solutrean Layers of Laugerie-Haute (Les Eyzies, Dordogne). Archaeological Implications," Paleo 23:105-116:2012.

Straus, Lawrence Guy. "On Maritime Hunter-Gatherers: A View From Cantabrian Spain," Munibe 33:171-173:1981.

_____. "Once More into the Breach: Solutrean Chronology," Munibe 38:35-38:1986.

_____, F. Bernaldo de Quirós, V. Cabrera, and G. Clark. "New Radiocarbon Dates for the Spanish Solutrean," Antiquity 51:243:1977.

Weaver, J. E. and F. W. Albertson. "Major Changes in Grassland as a Result of Continued Drought," Botanical Gazette 100:576-591:1939.

_____ and R. W. Darland. "Grassland Patterns In 1940," Ecology 25:202-215:1944.

Animals:
Horses - Equus caballus gallicus

Grasses:
Bluestems - Andropogon
Buffalo grass - Buchloe dactyloides
Grama, blue - Bouteloua gracilis
Grama, side oats grama - Bouteloua curtipendula
Wheat grass, western - Agropyron smithii, now Pascopyrum smithii

Graphics: Sémhur, "Carte de Localisation de la Culture Homo Sapiens du Solutréen, Environ entre -20 000 et 15 000," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 28 October 2009.

Aurignacian at El Castillo

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 in a few weeks. Now, back to life in early Spain.

The Aurignacian era was characterized by sparseness. The Homo sapiens population was still too small to enforce genetic uniformity or perpetuate its greatest innovations.

A mutation or recessive gene, which normally would have been reabsorbed by a dynamic genetic pool, could have become a dominant trait in an isolated band. As groups moved farther afield they came into contact with others like Denisovans in Asia, other Cro-Magnons in the Trans-Baikal, and, possibly, Neanderthals in Spain.

Did they interbreed, exchange tools, or did later transients simply pick up relics when they reused rock shelters? Anthropologists are debating, but with little evidence. The Aurignacians left few bones to associate with artifacts.

El Castillo, a cave in the Cantabrian region of Spain near the coast of the Bay of Biscay, illustrates the problem. It has clearly separated layers of Mousterian and Aurignacian artifacts with no hominid remains. Charcoal from the upper layer has been dated to 38,700 years ago.

The walls are covered with red ochre decorations. There’s nothing to connect the walls culturally with the floor. Sometimes, archaeologists get very lucky and find bits of pigment or shell containers stained with paints in a dated layer. Not here.

The oldest painting is a disk found in a group at the base of the Panel de las Manos. The calcite film that formed over it has been dated to 40,800 years ago. Anthropologists agree, it had to have been left by a Neanderthal.

More difficult to interpret are some hand stencils and a series of disks. The first, from the same area, has been dated 3,500 years or 175 generations later, that is 37,300 years ago. Three circles in the series, found in the far interior of the Corredor de los Puntos, were executed sometime between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago. All within the time range of the Aurignacian layer.

Some believe they too were the work of Neanderthals who appropriated the Aurignacian tool-kit or evolved their own variant. It’s as likely the red ochre technique was recreated from the earlier examples but used to satisfy a desire to make concrete images of abstract ideas.

That impulse for symbolic gestures was one of the defining traits of Cro-Magnons. It reached its apogee in the Swabian Alps. Someone left a statuette of a human body with a lion’s head in the Hohlenstein Stadel cave. It was chiseled from ivory with a flint knife 40,000 years ago.

At the nearby Hohle Fels cave a female figure was carved from a woolly mammoth tusk 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. Underneath it lay a 35,000-year-old bone flute made from a griffon vulture’s wing. At Geißenklösterle, archaeologists found fragments of two flutes, one from the bone of a mute swan, one from a woolly mammoth tusk. The instruments were 42,000 to 43,000 years old.

Geißenklösterle, near Blaubeuren, and Hohle Fels, near Schelklingen, are less than ten miles from each other on the Ach river that flows to the Danube by the Blau. Hohlenstein Stadel, nine miles from Ulm, is down river on the Lone tributary, maybe 25 miles away depending on the route.

Their carving tradition did not survive migration. No doubt it took craftsmanship pioneered by one individual who passed it on through demonstration. Those who moved southwest may have lost the skill, but kept the cultural vocabulary of symbols.

At Cuevo Morín, Leslie Freeman and Joaquín González Echegaray found molds of four bodies. The head and feet of one had been removed. As if they were recreating the Hohlenstein Stadel statue, the head of a large animal was placed above the torso. A smaller animal was laid across the legs, with a quartzite blade placed near the decapitated head. The pit was filled. Its mound was covered with red ochre, then burned.

Cave painting replaced carving as the primary medium for visual ritual expression in northern Spain. Dean Snow determined most of the hands stenciled on the walls were those of women.

Paul Pettitt isn’t convinced the fact most were left hands meant the artists who applied the pigment were using their own bodies. Some of the locations made it nigh impossible.

When he tried to replicate the process, he said his best results came from placing a hollow bird bone in a shell filled with liquified pigment. He held the shell near the hand resting against the hall and used another tube "to blow across the first. This created a vacuum which sucked the pigment up from the shell and out as a fine spray. This created the characteristic diffuse cloud of colour around the hand, while revealing the hand in sharp outline."

He noted the process created "a strange, loud whirring and whistling noise," perhaps like those Swabian flutes. He remembered it made him light headed in a cave lit by lamps burning animal fat.

Notes:
Cabrera Valdés, Victoria and James L. Bischoff. "Accelerator ¹⁴C Dates for Early Upper Paleolithic (Basal Aurignacian) at El Castillo Cave (Spain)," Journal of Archaeological Science 16:577-584:1989.

Freeman L. G., and J. G. Echegaray. "Aurignacian Structural Features and Burials at Cueva Morín (Santander, Spain)," Nature 226:722-6:1970; burial described by Hodge.

Hodge, Philip R. "Aurignacian Culture," in H. James Birx, Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2005; comment of small sample sizes.

Pettitt, Paul. "Hand Stencils in Upper Palaeolithic Cave Art," Durham University website; described attempts to replicate the process.

_____. The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial, 2013; comments on the absence of burials.

_____, A. W. G. Pike, J. Zilhão, et alia. (2012). "U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain," Science 336:1409-1413:2012.

Snow, Dean R. "Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art," American Antiquity 78:746-761:2013.

Cro-Magnon Cold Period Cultures

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 in a few weeks. Now, back to life in early Spain.

While the Aurignacian was diffusing to the west in the Indian-summer of the warm period, the onset of the new colder era in the east drove mammoths out of central Asia about 38,000 years ago. Those who depended on them may have followed. The merger of two cultures along the upper Danube river led to the development of the Gravettian. These were the first people to experiment with hardening clay with fire. They also left evidence of bone needles, basketry and cordage, perhaps for snares.

Their technology was slow to penetrate the west. Still 59 Gravettian sites have been located on the Iberian peninsula.

It disappeared about 22,000 years ago. The climate had continued to deteriorate with the expansion of the glaciers around 25,000 years ago. Much of northern and central Europe became uninhabitable arctic desert. Animals and plants retreated to refuges of the Pyrenees and Cantabrian mountains, where the Solutrean appeared about 20,000 years ago and disappeared about 5,000 years later. They were the first Europeans to throw their spears.

People living along the Danube moved east onto the Russian plains, where their Gravettian tools evolved into Epigravettian. The map below shows the Solutrean in rust and the late Gravettian in plum.  White represents glaciated areas.

Still farther east, in the mountainous region beyond Lake Baikal, Cro-Magnon culture became more complex, sometime after 30,000 years ago. Evgeny Rybin said, the reasons for the divergent life style in the open steppe were not yet identified, but could include "interactions between migrating human communities, ecological, and/or demographic stress."

Another merger of hitherto independent groups occurred in southern France where people were crowed together in refuges. Again, a new technical culture developed, this time around 16,000 years ago when the climate began warming. During the Magdalenian era, large central sites developed around mountain caves that functioned as civilization centers. Groups came together for ceremonies, but lived in smaller camps.

The map below shows the extent of the Magdalenian.

While tools changed through time, regional variations that arose from the local fauna persisted. Western areas of Europe relied on reindeer and tended to frequent caves, while eastern parts exploited mammoths in open-air sites. In northern Spain, individuals continued to eat horse and red deer.

Leslie Freeman said, during the unstable but generally warm Aurignacian of MIS3, 13 species were reported from 15 Cantabrian occupation layers with sites averaging 4.5 animals. Horse and red deer were the most common.

The number of species rose in the Solutrean as animals migrated south during the cold MIS2 years. He counted 19 species, with 8 occupation layers averaging 7.3. Horses were the most common. He believed the Pleistocene species of Equus tended to be associated with the open vegetation of colder climates.

During the severe conditions of the early Magdalenian, the number of species dropped to 9. Many of the 14 occupation sites only had 3. In the later Magdalenian, as the climate began to warm again, the variety rose to 22, and the average to 5.4 in 11 sites. Red deer was the most common. Cervus elaphus prefer woodlands that thrive in slightly warmer environments.

Notes:
Freeman, L. G. "The Significance of Mammalian Faunas from Paleolithic Occupations in Cantabrian Spain," American Antiquity 38:3-44:1973. He was counting occupation layers; any archaeological site can have more than one occupation. He was only including those that had identifiable animal remains.

Jochim, Michael. "The Upper Paleolithic," in Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory, 2011 second edition.

Rybin, Evgeny P. "Middle and Upper Paleolithic Interactions and the Emergence of ‘Modern Behavior’ in Southern Siberia and Mongolia" in Yousuke Kaifu, et alia, Emergence and Diversity of Modern Human Behavior in Paleolithic Asia, 2015.

Graphics:
1. Wobble. "Map of Europe 20,000 years Ago," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 25 February 2007.

2. Sémhur. "Location Map of Homo Sapiens during Magdalenian Culture, between 19,000 - 12,000 BP," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 6 February 2010.