 for being here in this summer's yester time. I hope don't bore you too much. Well, I am going to talk about an ongoing archaeological study of Iberian Iron Age sanctuaries. Well, I have studied different kinds of sanctuaries, of an age sanctuaries temple, but in this moment I will concentrate on the results about caves. Well, first of all, I am an astronomer, but almost all my works have been done in collaboration with archaeologists, so you can be not too much suspicious about the study. Well, in previous talks, Iberian culture has been defined. We are talking about culture in this part of Spain, in the Mediterranean desert of Spain, that developed in the last half of the first millennium BC and ended with the Roman invasion of Spain at about 200 BC. And along many years I have been studying Iberian sanctuaries and also Tartesian and various ones, the sanctuaries in the south, and this is more or less the inventory of places that I have studied. Only seven of them are cave sanctuaries, so the results are not still statistically significant. Well, I will talk to you about the results, the general results, the main results that I have found in opener and temples of the Iberian culture. When I study a site, I measure the orientation of the buildings, of the remains, but also I measure the horizon. With the purpose of seeing the relation of the building or of the sanctuary with the astronomical context, in the sense of where the rising of the celestial bodies or their setting occurs. In relation with the orientation of the temples, I have found that most of them are oriented to the east. Here we can see the 360 degrees of the horizon and each line represents one temple. They are oriented mostly to the east. You can see several crazy orientations. But most of them, I have to say that most of them correspond to second entrances, to buildings that have two entrances. One of them is oriented to the general custom to be oriented to the east, and the other one is oriented to the perpendicular. This is a correspond to the arc of the horizon where the sunrise takes place. The sunrise cannot take place at a few points of the horizon. As you know, it is restricted to an area. This represents that area. We can compare with the orientation patterns of temples of contemporary cultures in the western Mediterranean. We can see that Roman temples are normally oriented in a random form. Orientations from the Pruskans have a special orientation to the south half. The Greek also is quite random but concentrated to the east. We can see here Greek temples in the Magna Grecia and Sicily are also concentrated to the east. Also, Greek temples from North Africa. This is very interesting because the Roman temples dedicated to Saturn in North Africa are also oriented the same pattern. What's the meaning of this? Is it because in North Africa the Roman temples are dedicated to Saturn but normally the previous Punic temples are dedicated to Bahamon? You can see that the Iberian custom of orientation is similar to this one. With respect to the horizon that surrounds Iberian temples I have found a very striking result that is that almost half of them show equinoxial markers in their horizon. What does it mean? This is that the sunrise at Equinox, or very close to the equinox, is produced to a particular, a singular point of the horizon. Normally a mountain peak, for example. Here we can see a very stringing place. This is the remains, the very few remains of a wall of an Iberian sanctuary that is in a hill just up on the coast. You can see one of the walls that remain that is oriented to this isle. This is the isle of Benidorm. Many of you would know that. If you are there at the sanctuary in the morning of Equinox you will see that the sun rises just up. This is very stringing, and you can see also this marker and also the orientation of the temple. There are several other very stringing cases. This is one in El Amarejo where the sun of the Equinox makes its appearance here and is escalating in the south slope of the mountain just only in the Equinox. These are other cases. You can see orientation of walls in sacred spaces and Equinox taking place in the top of mountains. What about the caves? As I said before, I have only studied seven caves. Two of them do not show at least for me any astronomical relation, but five of them yes. Three of them are caves which are deeper than the size of the entrance. They can be considered caves. The other two are rocky shelters that are not deep. These three caves show stringing solar illumination phenomena, as we will see, and the rocky shelters have similarities with the open-air isberian sanctuaries because they show astronomical markers in the horizon. This is the first one that I studied with Herm. It's in the Cueva de la Lovera, one important Iberian sanctuary. We can see that there is an entrance at the north and this is very important because this is the western window of the cave and there are indications that the shape of this window was manipulated in the past. It was altered by Herm May. By Herm Mannheim. Yes, the important thing here, the important astronomical thing here is that just at the moment of the sunset when the sun is reaching the horizon at the equinoxes, the patch of light projected by the western window catches the innermost part of the cave. That coincides with a lot of holes all over this side. It may well reproduce in a particular shape in the patch of light. We can discuss about that, but this is not of the time. This is only produced at equinox. We can see that the patch of light is red and this is a very rapid phenomenon and we understand it as a erophyll because it might be related with a dramatization of the ritual. We told about that in the paper. This is another example. I called it Cueva de la Narita, but Susana told it Umbria de Salchito. We have some problems with the name. This cave is very spectacular because it has two main galleries like the galleries of the nose. There are two parallel galleries of the same name. We visited it. We noticed that at least the northern gallery was on the main axis, at least 20 meters long or more. I don't remember exactly. The gallery is oriented to the sunset at the winter. We were there at the moment of the sunset at that particular moment of the year and we can see from the innermost part of the cave you can see that the sun is setting perfectly at the middle of the abbey. At this point in the innermost part of the cave you can see this. There is a rock basin that normally collects the water from up to the spring that is in the interior of the cave and it has been manipulated. You can see here an artificial canal manipulated basin that collects the water. Just at the last sun rays of the day of the winter solstice you can see during a few seconds half a minute you can see tangential rays illuminating the surface of the water. You can understand that it gives a lot of... Well, it seems that to be a dramatization is something that could be very full of senses or full of information for the people seeing this. A third example is in Cueva Santa del Cabriol. This is the last one that I have studied with Sonia and this is very spectacular also because this is still a place of worship. It's still... It's now a Catholic sanctuary dedicated to the Virgin Mary but it was used as a Iberian sanctuary and also perhaps it was used even before in the Calculative and the Bronze Age. The main point of this is that the main entrance of the cave is the 12-meter long corridor is oriented perfectly to the summer source distance. You can see here a very tiny part of the horizon. This is the photographs of the illumination of the main gallery with the sun entering through the horizon and the last slides will be dedicated to the rocky shelters. I have said that they show astronomical markers similar to the open air sanctuaries as in the case of Cueva del Reymoro that we find equinoctial and substitution markers in the horizon and especially here in Cueva Negra in Fortuna, Colombia we have found the shelter is located to the south but we can see here a very particular mountain and if we measure the mountain we can find that the sunrise at 27 March should take place over that hill the mountain but this cave, this cave sanctuary in Roman times was plenty of inscriptions painted in inscriptions and in three of them the only thing that is indicated in the exhibition is six calendars of release it would correspond perfectly with 27 March if they were painted the exhibitions were painted in the first century AD which is a result which is consistent with the aesthetic chronology of the inscriptions this is a quite interesting result ok and that's my last slide well all the results indicate the importance of the results if it's an equinox in the Iberian reed what they should have at least a concept of quite the precision of the year at least how many or several reeds were related with this important part of the solar calendar the caves tend to be oriented to the west this is in contrast with the normal custom of the sun opener and then those sanctuaries that are oriented to the east in the caves there are evidences of manipulation of elements perhaps for the dramatization of the reed wall of the phenomenon of light and shadow inside the cave also the small the small size of the caves indicate that these phenomena these performances were restricted only for a small number of people restricted perhaps of passages or something and sanctuaries in rocky shelters show astronomical markers in a similar way than open air sanctuaries and there it seems that rocky shelters and caves should have differences in the reed wall this is something that we should study in the future thank you very much