MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Sealers camps unearthed in South Shetlands.

Researchers from the Chilean Antarctic Institute Natural History Museum have discovered interesting remains and utensils from sealing settlements in the South Shetland Islands dating back to the early XIXth. Century, reports Punta Arenas La Prensa Austral.

Apparently the researchers from Punta Arenas headed by archaeologist Ruben Stehberg have found two "intact" camps in Rugged island, west of Livingston Island with many artefacts and tools of daily life when the first seal hunters established their operational bases in 1820/23.

One of the camps was in a cavern where researchers unearthed shoe remains, ceramic mugs, pipes, glass bottles, buttons, carpentry nails and even some food, presumably seal meat, next to what seemed a cooking place.

The other camp in the open showed remains of what once had been several shacks, a cast iron stove and other vestiges of the sealers existence.

But the most surprising find was an iron lance or spear, almost four meters long, in quiet good conservation conditions which presumably was used to hunt the seals.

La Prensa Austral reports that researchers will now try to determine the exact date of the many utensils and remains found and begin compiling the "Antarctic Historic Archaeology" which includes a patrimonial inventory of South Shetlands.

The project and the in situ expedition have the support from the Chilean Antarctic Institute with main offices in Punta Arenas.

In related news the University of Magallanes is organizing for next April a "Tierra del Fuego-Patagonia quaternary sciences international congress".

The symposium will promote new interdisciplinary research programs of the quaternary in southern Chile and Antarctica including experts in palaeontology, geography, sediments, fossils DNA, glaciers, dendrology, physics, etc.

Among the invited are Cathy Whitlock from Oregon University; Valerie Hall, Queens University, Belfast; Alan Cooper from Oxford; Phillip Gibbard, Cambridge; Brent Alloway from New Zealand plus other scientists from Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina and Chile.