Visual Cultures in the Upper Palaeolithic

April Nowell

Using examples drawn from the European Upper Palaeolithic, this article advocates a visual
cultures approach to studying the art of this period. Visual culture is defined as the biolog-
ical, cognitive and social underpinnings of how we see, while the term art refers to what
we see. A visual cultures approach to these images allows the archaeologist to explore how
they were experienced, decoded and innovated upon within historically situated, overlap-
ping and entangled communities of practice and further affords archaeologists the tools and
the vocabulary they need to explore apprenticeship, active teaching, embodied cognition,
situated learning, scaffolding, enskillment, the existence of chaînes opératoires and the
impact of these materials on the human brain. European Upper Palaeolithic finger flutings
are presented as a case study of the visual cultures approach.

The debate over ‘art’ Robb’s (this issue) elegant model of the different ways
in which the term ‘art’ is conceptualized and stud-
The debate over whether or not to use the term ‘art’ ied in archaeology). As someone who sees archaeol-
to refer to the corpus of Palaeolithic imagery that ogy more as a science than a humanity, I value using
we normally think of when we use that term (e.g. precisely and accurately defined terms. The publica-
paintings, drawings and engravings of figurative and tion of Beyond Art: Pleistocene image and symbol (Con-
non-figurative subjects) reminds me of the angst an- key et al. 1997) and the conference upon which it is
thropologists suffer(ed) when trying to define the based were key to challenging archaeologists to be
term ‘culture’ (recall, for instance, Kroeber and Kluck- more mindful in their use of the term art (see also
hohn’s classic 1952 volume Culture: A critical review of Davidson 2012; 2013). Yet I will admit that in 2000, I
concepts and definitions, that offers more than 100 def- designed and have continued to teach a course called
initions of culture). I remember as an undergraduate Paleolithic Art. One of my first lectures is titled ‘I know
student being taken aback by the fact that a concept what I like but is it ‘art’?’, in which we explore this de-
as central to our field as ‘culture’ could be so diffi- bate in detail, using a myriad of examples from Rus-
cult to define—or at least by how difficult it was for sian Icons to Banksy and the work of performance
us to reach a consensus on its definition. My thought artist Susanne Heintz in order to challenge students
at the time was that the reason that anthropologists to probe the boundaries of the category of affective
had trouble reaching a consensus was that we were material culture we call art. While we always con-
confounding many different uses of and needs for the clude that its modern Western connotations1 and the
term ‘culture’ into one word. The tension and confu- inherent difficulty of defining what is ‘art’ even in our
sion caused by this tendency led to a great many aca- own time have largely rendered the term irrelevant (at
demic articles and conference papers, but to little else. least in a Palaeolithic context), I still find myself slip-
My sense is that, at the end of the day, this debate has ping into using this old, familiar, comfortable term—
largely fallen away (except in undergraduate courses) especially when I speak to the general public. I am still
without moving the field very much forward on the of two minds whether there are legitimate instances
issue. of when using ‘art’ with all of its traditional connota-
tions is warranted or whether it is never warranted—
Is art ever ‘art’? even in a modern Western context. Is the term art it-
I think the culture debate is a reasonable analogy self an artefact of our making? In other words, was
to the one we are having now about ‘art’ (see John there ever a time and place when ‘art’ functioned and
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27:4, 599–606 
C 2017 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

doi:10.1017/S0959774317000634 Received 7 June 2017; Accepted 13 August 2017; Revised 10 August 2017

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 April Nowell

incorporated all of the assumptions that White (2003) tangled communities of practice. As Conkey (2009)
has argued are associated with it now? Would has written, ‘images and forms were generated within
Michelangelo have recognized what we mean by ‘art’ and by communities of practice … in that sense [they
in that sense? are] not art images but rather [the] artful integration
Returning to the analogy of the debate on cul- of many entangled material and social factors’. This
ture, I am reminded of a story that Margaret Conkey approach is in agreement with Gell (1998, 3–4), who
told at the end of a public lecture on Palaeolithic argues that an anthropology of art must ‘[focus] on
‘art’ that she gave at the University of Victoria many the social context of art production, circulation and re-
years ago. She described the excitement of the late ception’ in order to be in line with the larger body of
rock-art specialist Patricia Vinnicombe in having anthropological theory.
an opportunity to ask Australian aboriginal elders Further, visual cultures incorporate the biologi-
about the meaning of their art. Conkey recounts that cal and cognitive dimensions of art as well. Specif-
Vinnicombe enthusiastically asked, ‘Is it about your ically, studying Pleistocene visual cultures within a
ancestors? About hunting? About spirits?’ The elders communities of practice approach affords me the tools
answered, ‘yes’. Similarly, to the question of whether and the vocabulary I need to explore apprenticeship,
‘archaeological art’ is ‘art’ in Robb’s sense, affective active teaching, embodied cognition, situated learn-
material culture, or something else, the answer is yes. ing, scaffolding, enskillment (e.g. Fritz et al. 2016;
Art in an archaeological context is probably all of Rivero 2016; Sinclair 2015), the existence of chaînes
these things and more. opératoires (e.g. Farbstein 2010; 2011a,b) and the impact
of these materials on our plastic brains. In my research
The relationship between art and Pleistocene (Nowell 2015a,b), I ask questions such as ‘how did
visual cultures growing up within a Pleistocene visual culture struc-
ture the neuronal connections of Ice Age children and
Art influence the adults they became?’ and ‘how did they
For my own purposes, when I am writing and think- learn to think through and about pictures/visual ma-
ing about the corpus of Palaeolithic ‘art’, I have come terial culture?’. In the words of Malafouris (2013, 202),
to use the phrase ‘Pleistocene visual cultures’, fol- how did ‘those early pictures bring forth a new pro-
lowing Soffer and Conkey (1997; see Nowell 2006) cess of acting within the world and at the same time
and, much more recently, the term ‘art’ in the sense thinking about it’? How did this impact people’s rela-
of Davidson (2013). Davidson (2013, 42) defines art tionships with each other, with animals, with objects
as ‘the making and marking of surfaces where the and the environment? In sum, what I gain from study-
images have implicational meaning for the observer ing Pleistocene visual cultures, rather than simply art,
whether or not they know the full propositional mean- is the ability to focus on the biological, cognitive and
ing of the artist’. In this sense, art for me includes social underpinnings of how we see, rather than what
not only the paintings, engravings, drawings and we see.
figurines as described above, but also body adorn-
ments (and the adorned body—e.g. tattooing, pierc- Making these definitions work in a Palaeolithic
ing, scarification), textiles and decorated tools. This context
does not mean that ‘everything is art’. Art remains a
bounded category, because Davidson’s (2013) defini- Communities of practice
tion focuses on the transformative power of the recog- Because the ways of engaging in art are ‘learned
nition that signs (in the Peircean sense) can be sym- and practiced by community members’ (Joyce 2012,
bols. In this way, these marked surfaces are readily 150) within the visual culture(s) of which they are a
distinguishable from the act and products of grind- part, communities of practice persist over time. As
ing plant materials with a pestle (Lippi et al. 2015), a result, one way to identify communities of prac-
scraping hides and making (undecorated) tools, even tice in art production is to identify archaeologically
though these behaviours often mark surfaces. visible standardized means of production or ‘tradi-
tions’, of which there are many in the Upper Palae-
Pleistocene visual cultures olithic. Well-known examples include thousands of
For me, the term Pleistocene visual cultures2 (Soffer & tiny Aurignacian (c. 35,000 bp) basket-shaped, mam-
Conkey 1997) encompasses Davidson’s notion of art, moth ivory beads (White 2007), highly standardized
but also the social production of these art objects and animal-head cutouts known as ‘contours découpés’,
how they were experienced, decoded and innovated animal-ended spear-throwers (Conkey 1993; Dobres
upon within historically situated, overlapping and en- 2001) and feline-human statues from three sites in

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 Visual Cultures in the Upper Palaeolithic

Germany (Conard 2011). Another way to identify sophisticated ivory and bird-bone flutes are believed
communities of practice is to look for points of dis- to have been produced beginning in the Aurignacian
juncture or discontinuity in the archaeological record (c. 43,000-30,000 bp), partially because before that suit-
that might reflect changes in social practice. For exam- ably large avians (e.g. raptors and swans) were un-
ple, there is at times a diverging relationship between known in this region (Morley 2013; Tyrberg 1998). A
fauna chosen to be consumed and fauna chosen to be change in resource availability may have impacted
depicted on cave walls (Gonzales-Morales 1997). An- not only the use of one material (hollow bird bones),
other example is the change in recipe used to make but the way in which another (ivory) was conceived
pigments employed in the production of images in of as well.
caves such as Niaux in southwest France. While artis- A final example is the Aurignacian ivory beads
tic style remained the same over generations, there is mentioned above (White 2007). Most are quite small
a clear regional change in pigment recipe at 13,000 bp (some approaching the size of seed pearls), perfo-
with the addition of biotite as an extender (Clottes rated and manufactured using the same techniques
1995). We know that not only adults, but children (e.g. splitting, wedging, scraping, gouging, and pol-
too, engaged in, or at least witnessed, the produc- ishing) as those used to make Aurignacian figurines
tion of images at different times and places in the Up- (Conneller 2011). Given their size, artisans threading
per Palaeolithic, based on evidence such as footprints, ivory and bone needles and sewing these beads on
handprints, finger holes in clay and tiny finger flut- spun, dyed textiles (e.g. Kvavadze et al. 2009; Soffer
ings at caves in France and Spain (e.g. Bahn & Vertut 2004; Soffer et al. 2000), were almost certainly working
1997; Clottes 2013; Roveland 2000; Van Gelder 2015a). by touch and embodied gesture (i.e. muscle memory),
rather than by sight, to create objects with meaning for
Embodied cognition, extended cognition, skill and members of that particular visual culture.
experience
There are a number of ways in which people experi- Ways of seeing and knowing
ence and learn about the world around them. I will Finally, we can look at how Pleistocene visual cultures
briefly mention two that are relevant for our discus- impact ways of seeing and knowing. These topics
sion of Palaeolithic art and Pleistocene visual cultures: are explored in much more depth elsewhere (Now-
(1) embodied cognition and (2) extended cognition. ell 2015a,b), but one example, that of metaphorical
Embodied cognition is ‘a growing research program thinking, will be touched on here. Metaphors are said
in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative to act as a bridge between different realities, different
role the environment plays in the development of cog- levels of meaning and different realms of experience
nitive processes’ (IEP n.d.), while extended cognition (Billow 1981). Humans use metaphorical thinking to
is the result of that instance of entanglement between recognize patterns and create relationships between
‘the affordances … of the raw material and the sen- disparate elements and to imbue these patterns and
sorimotor properties of the human hand’ (Malafouris relationships with meaning (Nowell 2015b), and they
2013, 176) and individual skill and experience. These learn to do so from a very early age. It can be argued
types of cognition can be studied through the artist’s3 that metaphorical thinking through pareidolia (the
use of space, as expertly documented by Fritz and human ability to attribute significance to ambiguous
Tosello (2007) in their study of drawings in Chau- or random data: see Geary 2011) underlies many
vet Cave. By meticulously reconstructing the order in forms of Upper Palaeolithic art. Upper Palaeolithic
which each line was drawn and whether it was drawn artists are well known for incorporating the natural
with confidence in one stroke, or with hesitation, or if topography of a cave’s wall in their paintings and
it was erased and redrawn, these researchers are able engravings—a convexity lends three-dimensional
to recreate how artist(s) positioned themselves in the corporality to an animal, while a concavity can be
cave, navigated that space, were limited or liberated transformed into an eye. For example, at the French
by the affordances of the materials they worked with, site of Cougnac, artists incorporated natural flow
including the texture and humidity of the cave wall, stone into a drawing of an Ibex in order to depict
and worked around, incorporated, or at times ignored the shaggy texture of its coat (Fig. 1), while at Al-
pre-existing art. tamira in Spain natural protrusions give Palaeolithic
Other examples include the challenges of work- bison corporeal roundness: other rock protrusions
ing with new materials, such as ivory, bone and shell. in the cave turn into eerie masks with the addition
In particular, much has been made of the texture, lu- of eyes drawn in charcoal. Similarly, the ‘human-
minosity and material exigencies of ivory in the early ness’ of the half-human, half-feline figurine from
Upper Palaeolithic of Europe (e.g. Heckle 2009), while Geißenklösterle, Germany (Conard 2011) (Fig. 2)

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 April Nowell

Figure 1. (Colour online) An ibex from Cougnac, France. By incorporating the flowstone on the cave wall the animal is
given a ‘shaggy’ coat. (Photograph: Jean Clottes).

mentioned above is likely a function of the shape of their subsequent histories’. In other words, for David-
the ivory tusk from which it is made, including the son (2013) and Malafouris (2013) and myself, the inter-
dental cavity which facilitated separated (bipedal) esting questions relate to how living in a pictorial cul-
legs (Conneller 2011). Whether the artist had a con- ture fundamentally and irrevocably changes the way
cept of imaginary (i.e. composite) figures before you see the world and thus changes the life course of
picking up this piece of ivory, or whether the natural the communities of which you are a part. This is what
shape of the ivory brought forth a concept of an studying Pleistocene visual cultures brings you that
imaginary creature, is an interesting question to ex- simply studying art does not.
plore and could be resolved if, for example, an older
two-dimensional image of such a creature is found. Discussion and conclusion
What seems clear is that, while pareidolia and re-
lated phenomena may be human universals (Geary In this context, I am working with Leslie Van Gelder,
2011), the particular form they take is culturally me- who, along with her late husband, Kevin Sharpe,
diated, and children growing up in a particular vi- developed a pioneering method for recording and
sual culture learn to process (i.e. to imagine, cre- analysing Upper Palaeolithic finger flutings (e.g.
ate and ‘see’) these metaphors as others before them Sharpe & Van Gelder 2004; 2005; 2009; 2010; Van
have done (Nowell 2015a,b). Pleistocene visual cul- Gelder 2012; 2015a,b,c,d). Finger flutings (Fig. 3) are
tures were, as their modern counterparts are, tied to quite literally the residue of touch and result when
their particular economies and landscapes. The visual Upper Palaeolithic peoples in France, Spain and Aus-
cultures approach gives us a means of exploring the tralia used their fingers to draw in soft sediment cov-
recursive relationships between these variables and ering cave walls and ceilings. While flutings were
art. As Davidson (2013, 26) notes, ‘it is likely that once dismissed as ‘parasite lines’ by the famous pre-
the differentiation between those hunters and gather- historian Henri Breuil (1912), through years of metic-
ers who did engage in art (say, in the west Mediter- ulous work Sharpe and Van Gelder were able to
ranean regions) and those who did not (say, in the east demonstrate that the flutings, even in the largest
Mediterranean region) led to different relationships caves, were made by small groups of people (i.e. never
with the resources of their environments and hence less than two, never more than nine); the larger groups

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 Visual Cultures in the Upper Palaeolithic

how Upper Palaeolithic peoples engaged with each

other, whether they chose to depict figurative and/or
non-figurative images, how flutings relate to the pro-
duction of other types of art and how these variables
change over time (e.g. were children always invited
into these spaces?). We also address embodied and ex-
tended cognition in terms of how the senses of touch
and sound may have been as important as sight in
navigating these spaces, how the material affordances
of the cave walls determined, at least to some extent,
whether Upper Palaeolithic peoples fluted, engraved
or painted and how these people relied on embodied
gestures to create figurative and non-figurative im-
ages as they moved through space. Finally, we ad-
dress how Upper Palaeolithic peoples came to see
and know the world through, for instance, document-
ing the incorporation of the natural environment into
fluted images. For example, at the French site of Rouf-
fignac, with the ‘Mammoths of Discovery’ (finger-
drawn mammoths with a row of flutings both within
one of the mammoths and beyond), the mammoth’s
eye is a well-placed stone (Van Gelder pers. comm.,
2017). Not only can we think of this as an example of
metaphorical thinking as discussed above, but we can
also ask questions related to how people learned to
move between two, three and four dimensions (Now-
ell 2015a,b). In other words, how do you learn to ren-
der a three-dimensional animal in two dimensions
and, conversely, how do we recognize that a flattened
image of a mammoth is a mammoth in some ways
(as we assume they did), but differed from it in other
equally significant ways? Gathering all of these data
allows us to begin to reconstruct how specific groups
of Upper Palaeolithic peoples at certain times and cer-
tain places came to experience and know the world
Figure 2. (Colour online) Löwenmensch figure from around them.
Hohlestein-Stadel, Germany. (Photograph: Dagmar To return now to the question at the heart of this
Hollmann/Wikimedia Commons, Licence CC BY-SA 3.0.) essay—what is art in an archaeological context? In
some ways, it is easy to shrug off this question. We
all think that we more or less mean the same thing
always included children, who were sometimes the when we write about ‘art’, but as Robb (this volume)
most prolific fluters; and panels were often created has shown, we do not. I have argued that there is
in concert as documented by the criss-crossing of much to be gained by using the term visual culture
differently sized flutings produced by different-sized instead of art as it moves us from a focus on what we
hands. Van Gelder (2015e) describes her work as an see (art) to a focus on how we see. This is not simply
‘archaeology of intimacy’ where, through the appli- a case of semantics—of substituting one vague term
cation of forensic techniques, these small moments in for another—to me, the term represents a fundamen-
time can be rendered visible. tal shift in the way I conduct my research: in the ques-
Our ongoing study of finger flutings takes a tions I ask, the data I collect and the results I obtain.
Pleistocene visual cultures approach by identifying I hope that I have demonstrated here that if I stud-
communities of practice through the documentation ied the flutings as art, I would understand how they
of who entered the caves (age and sex categories were produced, how they change over time, how they
whenever possible, as well as minimum number of in- co-occur (or not) with other types of art and perhaps
dividuals), who engaged in mark making, where and something about their aesthetics; but I would miss

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 April Nowell

Figure 3. (Colour online) Finger fluting from Rouffignac Cave, France. (Photograph: Leslie Van Gelder.)

how people growing up in these cultures experienced 3. If I use Davidson’s (2013) definition of art, then an artist
these flutings—how they learned to ‘read’ them, if can be defined as the person who engages in the mak-
you will, and through that process how they came to ing and marking of those surfaces.
know the world around them.
April Nowell
Department of Anthropology
Notes University of Victoria
3800 Finnerty Rd
1. White (2003) identified eight assumptions of modern
Western art, including that there is a distinct sphere of
Victoria, BC V8P 5C2
action called art; ‘true’ art is a work of genius; ‘it fulfills Canada
an innate need in people to comprehend themselves Email: [email protected]
and the universe’; that it is distinct from craft; it can
be appreciated for its aesthetic qualities alone and its
‘effects are virtually universal based on natural visual References
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 April Nowell

Nowell, A. 2015a. Learning to see and seeing to learn: chil- monde /Pleistocene art of the world/Arte pleistoceno en el
dren, communities of practice and Pleistocene visual mundo, ed. J. Clottes. (N° spécial de Préhistoire, Art
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Nowell, A. 2015b. Children, metaphorical thinking and Up- Pyrénées 45–46 (2010–2011), 1207–20.
per Paleolithic visual cultures. Childhood in the Past Van Gelder, L., 2015a. Counting the children: the role of chil-
8(2), 122–32. dren in the production of finger flutings in four Upper
Rivero, O., 2016. Master and apprentice: evidence for learn- Palaeolithic caves. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 34(2),
ing in Palaeolithic portable art. Journal of Archaeological 120–31.
Science 75, 89–100. Van Gelder, L., 2015b. Finger Flutings in Koonalda Cave –
Roveland, B., 2000. Footprints in the clay: Upper Palaeolithic New Explorations, Discoveries, and Methodological
children in ritual and secular contexts, in Children and Challenges. Paper presented at the Nineteenth Con-
Material Culture, ed. J. Sofaer. London: Routledge, 29– ference of the International Federation of Rock Art
38. Researchers, Caceres, Spain, 31 August–4 September
Sharpe, K. & L. Van Gelder, 2004. Children and Paleolithic 2015.
‘art’: indications from Rouffignac Cave, France. Inter- Van Gelder, L. 2015c. Using Finger Flutings as a Method for
national Newsletter on Rock Art 38, 9–17. Examining Interpersonal Relationships among Upper
Sharpe, K. & L. Van Gelder, 2005. Techniques for studying Paleolithic Cave Artists. Paper presented at the Nine-
finger flutings. Society of Primitive Technology Bulletin teenth Conference of the International Federation of
30, 68–74. Rock Art Researchers, Caceres, Spain, 31 August–4
Sharpe, K. & L. Van Gelder, 2009. Paleolithic finger flutings September 2015.
as efficient communication: applying Zipf’s Law to Van Gelder, L., 2015d. Group Sizes of Upper Paleolithic
two panels in Rouffignac Cave, France. Semiotica 177, Cave Artists. Paper presented at the Eleventh Con-
171–90. ference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, Vienna,
Sharpe, K. & L. Van Gelder, 2010. Fluted animals in the Austria, 7–11 September 2015.
zone of crevices, Gargas Cave, France, in Proceedings Van Gelder, L., 2015e. Cave Art and Enduring Kindness.
of the XV World Congress UISPP (Lisbon, 4–9 September TEDx talk, Queenstown, New Zealand. Online at:
2006). (BAR International series S2108.) Oxford: Ar- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYGPc0hf5Ss
chaeopress, 93–102. White, R., 2003. Prehistoric Art: The symbolic journey of hu-
Sinclair, A., 2015. All in a day’s work? Early conflicts in ex- mankind. New York (NY): Harry N. Abrams.
pertise, life history and time management, in Settle- White, R., 2007. Systems of personal ornamentation in the
ment, Society and Cognition in Human Evolution, eds. Early Upper Palaeolithic: methodological challenges
F. Coward, R. Hosfield, M. Pope & F. Wenban. Cam- and new observations, in Rethinking the Human Rev-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 94–116. olution, eds. P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef &
Soffer, O., 2004. Recovering perishable technologies C. Stringer. Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Ar-
through use wear on tools: preliminary evidence for chaeological Research, 287–302.
Upper Paleolithic weaving and net making. Current
Anthropology 45(3), 407–13.
Soffer, O., J.M. Adovasio & D.C. Hyland. 2000. The ‘venus’ Author biography
figurines: textiles, basketry, gender, and status in the
Upper Paleolithic. Current Anthropology 41(4), 511–37. April Nowell is a Palaeolithic archaeologist and Professor of
Soffer, O. & M. Conkey, 1997. Studying ancient visual cul- Anthropology at the University of Victoria. She specializes
tures, in Beyond Art: Pleistocene image and symbol, eds. in the origins of art, language and other symbolic behaviour,
M.W. Conkey, O. Soffer, D. Stratmann & N.G. Jablon- in the emergence of the modern mind and in the growth and
ski. (Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences development of Middle to Late Pleistocene children. Cur-
23.) Oakland (CA): University of California Press, rently, she directs an international team in the excavation of
1–16. Lower and Middle Palaeolithic sites in Jordan and co-directs
Straus, L.G., 2009. Has the notion of ‘transitions’ outlived its a study of European Upper Palaeolithic finger flutings with
usefulness? The European record in wider context, in Dr Leslie Van Gelder. She is co-editor with Iain Davidson
Sourcebook of Paleolithic Transitions, eds. M. Camps & of Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition (Univer-
P. Chauhan. New York (NY): Springer, 3–18. sity Press of Colorado, 2010) and Making Scenes: Global per-
Tyrberg, T., 1998. Pleistocene Birds of the Palearctic: A catalogue. spectives on scenes in rock art (Berghahn Books, forthcom-
Cambridge (MA): Nuttall Ornithological Club. ing); and with Nancy Gonlin of Archaeology of Night: Life af-
Van Gelder, L., 2012. New methods and approaches in the ter dark in the ancient world (University Press of Colorado,
study of finger flutings, in L’art pléistocène dans le forthcoming).

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