Ethno-acoustician Lauriane Lemasson is passionate about the relationships that peoples weave with their sonic environment. Her profession drives her, microphone in hand, to brave the harsh expanses of Patagonia. Her goal: to better understand the settlement dynamics and cultural sources of inspiration of the Indigenous peoples who once inhabited these remote regions before being decimated.
A land of silence and infinite spaces. In this Argentine Patagonian pampa, stretching out as if it would never end, people are few and not very talkative. There is no point in asking for directions. Apart from a few shaggy sheep who themselves seem to wonder what they’re doing there, there is no one left to answer in these places.
In any case, south of 53° South, once past the bustling Strait of Magellan (or Magellan Strait), there is hardly more than a single real road on this gigantic archipelago that is Tierra del Fuego: Ruta No. 3, a licorice-colored ribbon winding from north to south, linking the town of Rio Grande to the port of Ushuaia. Otherwise, this antipode—one of the least populated in the southern cone of South America—consists of vast steppes speckled with dark lakes, unassailable mountains, and forests thrown to the margins of the ocean.
All on Foot
And to make matters worse, everywhere there are gnarled, half-bent shrubs twisted by the gusts, impenetrable thickets, lines of rusty barbed wire, and endless fences that seem to conspire to block access to the vast private estancias that still checker most of this land. That’s the setting: a void as staggering as it is hostile. And no welcoming committee.
Yet it is in this complicated land that Lauriane Lemasson, 30 years old, has chosen to lose herself, alone, for months on end, traveling only on foot and always off the main marked road. This strong-willed young Breton woman has stepped over obstacles and ignored prohibitions in order to go “where no one goes anymore,” except for the gauchos. In short, a true wandering adventure. And in complete autonomy, burdened with a 25-kilo backpack in which Lauriane packed her gasoline stove, enough provisions to last between seven and nineteen days without resupply depending on the journey, her tent, her sleeping bag, her trusty Leica camera, her notebooks, and above all a host of microphones and recording equipment.
A Compass and a Map
She often forgot to look for shelter for the night—“in any case, most of the time there wasn’t any,” she recalls—and on her first escape, our tireless walker didn’t even have a GPS, just a compass and a good old 1:750,000 scale map. The goal of these rough outings? “To capture the sounds of the Patagonian landscapes,” she answers quite seriously. A strange quest, an unusual plan.
Because here, apart from the gusts that sometimes whistle so loudly they can make you deaf, silence and contemplation reign. “Very quickly, you realize that this space is inhabited by a thousand little sounds that truly sketch out the soundscapes I’m chasing,” Lauriane admits. The timid cries of birds, the plaintive creaking of trees in the storm, the grunting of sea lions, the distant cracking of glaciers… The slightest echo becomes, for our explorer, a kind of company.
The Violence of the Elements
“During my first journey across Tierra del Fuego,” she recalls, “over three and a half months of wandering, I met, outside urban areas, only three people: two estancieros, ranch workers who couldn’t believe they were seeing a Frenchwoman walking alone in the area, and an old Argentinian, a retiree who became my friend. He has since passed away, but he lived in isolation and welcomed me into his home without hesitation one day when the weather was very bad…”
Rain, snow, storms, blazing sun, sweltering heat, or chills rising from Antarctica… This region has always faced the violence and magic of the elements. Before it was discovered by the West during Magellan’s expedition in 1512, medieval portolan charts summed up the area with a few uncertain notes: “fogs,” “end of the world,” “anti-land.” But it takes more than that to throw off our adventurer. Because Lauriane is not just an explorer. And she’s certainly not a female Don Quixote chasing impossible windmills.
A doctoral student at the Sorbonne, she conducts her sonic explorations as part of a rigorous, multidisciplinary thesis in ethnomusicology and acoustics. This unprecedented research project, which she began in 2011, is based on an initial intuition that she continues to test during her expeditions in Tierra del Fuego: “My explorations between Rio Grande and Ushuaia, in the Corazón de la Isla provincial reserve near Lake Fagnano, on the Beagle Channel, and through the Cape Horn biosphere reserve are all founded on a conviction. The sounds of these places (soundscapes) can still teach us things about the Amerindian peoples who once inhabited them—provided we listen carefully to what they have to say,” she explains. Just as every corner of the planet has its particular smell, colors, and temperatures, an ambiance is also shaped by its acoustics.
“Everyone has experienced this,” the scientist points out. “Whether you are in front of a mountain, in a forest, in a desert, or at the center of an ancient theater, the soundscape influences how we occupy and perceive a place. This is what I try to understand, adding the filters of history, geography, and anthropology.”
From this perspective, analyzing the acoustic dimension of an archaeological site, an ancient Amerindian camp, or a sanctuary where shamanic rituals once took place makes it possible to better explain the past, or even to reconstruct part of the environment and culture of those who lived there.
Microphone in Hand, Ears on Alert
The researcher has traveled more than 2,000 kilometers on foot, driven by a single goal: to once again hear the echoes of the first Fuegian peoples, these Patagonian natives who are now virtually unknown to the general public. “Most books and articles on the subject claim that these Amerindians, who arrived in Tierra del Fuego more than 10,000 years ago, disappeared long ago,” Lauriane protests. “But from my very first trip, I realized the reality was quite different: descendants of these Indigenous peoples—exterminated by European colonists or forcibly assimilated into Hispanic culture—are still very much alive, whether in Argentina or Chile. Nor have their cultures and languages, though certainly threatened with imminent disappearance after years of being disregarded, been erased from memory.”
Based on this realization, the young researcher’s quest took on an even greater sense of urgency. Supported in her work by the ethnologist and Arctic explorer Jean Malaurie—a legendary figure in the world of extreme adventure—Lauriane multiplied her sound recordings and acoustic tests. On this land now emptied of its first inhabitants, she uncovered forgotten campsites, as well as 2,500 hut locations. She even managed to reconstruct the original Amerindian place names of these sites, which had been replaced by the names given by the Spanish. All this painstaking work now allows Lauriane to suggest that in these ancestral societies, which were entirely oriented toward nature, shamanic chants and rituals were mainly inspired by the sounds made by animals, trees, waves, and winds.
Meeting the Yagans
The ethno-acoustician also set out to meet the last speakers of the Yagan, Haush, and Selknam languages in Argentina and Chile. This brought to life the accounts left by the few anthropologists who, at the start of the last century, took an interest in these Indigenous peoples—such as the missionary Martin Gusinde, who, in the 1920s, quickly set aside his evangelizing mission to immerse himself passionately in the daily life of the tribes. In 2018, during a new journey, Lauriane decided to focus her research precisely on the Yagans studied by Gusinde. This time, her destination was the Beagle Channel (Onashaga in the Yagan language). Unlike the Selknams and Haushs, who were hunter-gatherers, the Yagans lived on the water. They were nomads of the channels, traveling in long canoes and subsisting mainly on shellfish, which, according to old accounts, were harvested from icy depths by nearly naked women divers. The atmosphere changed entirely. This expedition took place in a maritime Tierra del Fuego, livelier and even windier than before, where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet head-on, often creating dramatic weather conditions.
A little further south of the Beagle Channel lies Cape Horn, renowned as the “official homeland of seasickness.” Then there are the famous caletas—fjords with spongy shores and trees draped in long strands of lichen, inlets carved out by glaciers thousands of years ago. These labyrinths wind westward, beyond Ushuaia, then along the Pacific coast of Chilean fjords and all the way to the Chiloé Archipelago. “Sailing is the only way if you want to land on the islets and coves scattered everywhere,” Lauriane notes. “My initial idea was to wander by canoe like the Yagans, but technically the expedition was too complex and very risky.” So, she joined a French family as a crew member on a sailboat for a three-month expedition. They stocked up and set sail from Ushuaia, then crossed the closely monitored border waters patrolled by the Chilean navy for a first stop in the world’s southernmost port: Puerto Williams, on Chile’s Navarino Island, a major center of Yagan culture. From there, they headed west, zigzagging through the two arms of the Beagle and exploring the shores on foot to catalog the campsites.
For this journey, the acoustician improved her sound investigation tools: microphones capable of recording in all directions, the latest recorders, meticulous protocols, and… a simple wooden box! Bought at a hardware store in Ushuaia, the object is the size of a shoebox. By tapping on its lid, like a drum, it produces a sharp, loud noise that resonates in the emptiness—perfect for testing the echo of a place and analyzing how sound travels through a given site. Inspired by the protocol developed in 1967 by François Canac (a French scientist who worked notably on the acoustics of Roman amphitheaters), this kind of box test helps better understand sites once occupied by the first inhabitants.
A Crucial Discovery
After leaving the boat, Lauriane returned to the steppes for two more months of solitary research. Then, last April, during her latest expedition, she made her most important discovery in the center of Tierra del Fuego. She headed to the Ewan I site, once used by the Selknam for the Hain initiation ritual for young adults. Studied by the anthropology and archaeology laboratory of Cadic (the Southern Center for Scientific Research in Ushuaia), the site still has a ceremonial hut standing, dated to 1905. “There,” Lauriane recounts, “I was able to carry out acoustic tests to understand the placement of this hut. Located on the edge of an old clearing, Ewan I actually functions like an amphitheater, where sounds (songs, words, cries) are absorbed, conducted, or deflected by the terrain. It is likely that these effects were not accidental but were considered in the choice of the ritual site to ensure the ceremony went smoothly.” This sheds new light on the acoustician’s university thesis. “Tomorrow, we’ll be able to explain other sacred sites by analyzing how they resonate,” she says enthusiastically, already thinking about her next trip. It will be soon, and perhaps aboard her own little sailboat. “I dream of crossing the Atlantic,” confides our Breton. Before once again setting course south, toward that Fuegian land that still has so many sonic nuances to whisper to her.
Archaeological Research in Patagonia: Tolhuin, in Argentine Tierra del Fuego
On the road leading to Cerro Michi, a team of archaeologists from GIATMA (affiliated with CADIC-CONICET) made a significant discovery: during fieldwork, the archaeologists found materials and a new archaeological site, which they then began to study.
This discovery is part of the ImpaCT.AR project, Challenge 2, “Archaeological Cultural Heritage in Tolhuin,” supported by the municipality and accompanied since the first term of Daniel Harrington. The main objective is the identification and protection of the region’s archaeological cultural heritage.
The research team carried out fieldwork, including surveys and excavations within the urban area of Tolhuin, with the aim of creating an archaeological risk map to zone sensitive areas. This provides municipal authorities with crucial information for the preservation of heritage during infrastructure projects.
The ImpaCT.AR project is not limited to identifying archaeological sites; it also includes training for personnel directly or indirectly involved in changes to the urban landscape. Workers are made aware of the importance of archaeological heritage and the need to be vigilant during activities involving ground movement.
The discovery on the road to Cerro Michi adds to other finds in Tolhuin, such as on the road to the pier, at Laguna Varela, the descent to Lake Fagnano, and in the residential neighborhood of Las Laderas del Kamuk. The central strategy of this collaboration between CADIC-CONICET and the Municipality of Tolhuin is prevention, ensuring that infrastructure works are carried out carefully and with respect for the heritage shared by the community.
What is an archaeological discovery?
According to the Guide for the Formulation of the Protocol for Chance Discoveries of Archaeological Heritage and Public Archaeology, an archaeological discovery is the unexpected encounter with archaeological materials such as vessels or fragments, lithic objects (stones or rocks), animal or human bones, figurines, wooden or metal utensils, or any other ancient element. In this regard, the municipality of Tolhuin was expected to specify the nature of the materials found to provide context for the news; however, the community will have to wait for a forthcoming report to learn more.
Representantes de las comunidades de pueblos originarios de Tierra del Fuego viajan a Francia a exponer sobre sus culturas ancestrales, en el marco del mes de la ciencia y la cultura que se desarrolla en ese país. El 2019 fue declarado por la ONU el Año internacional de las Lenguas Indígenas, con el fin de difundir su importante aporte a la cultura de los pueblos.
La secretaria de Relaciones Internacionales Cecilia Fiocchi destacó la presencia en Francia de los representantes de las comunidades originarias: “Es un orgullo para todos los fueguinos que integrantes de las comunidades originarias puedan participar de eventos internacionales como este, que es impulsados por investigadores de la Universidad de la Sorbona y del Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas, instituciones académicas francesas de gran prestigio”. “Es una oportunidad para visibilizar las culturas ancestrales de nuestra provincia” valoró.
Mirtha Salamanca, integrante de la comunidad selk´nam de Río Grande, Víctor Vargas, integrante del pueblo yagán de Ushuaia y José González Calderón, de la comunidad yagán de Puerto Williams viajan a Francia a exponer sobre las culturas ancestrales originarias de Tierra del Fuego.
Mirtha Salamanca es integrante del Consejo Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas, como representante del pueblo selk´nam. “Viajaremos a Francia invitados por investigadores de ese país, para visibilizar allí nuestra cultura ancestral y complementar una serie de investigaciones que estamos realizando sobre nuestro pueblo. Además de participar como expositores en charlas y conferencia en distintas partes del país, podremos visitar los archivos de Anne Chapman, quien fue una gran investigadora de nuestra cultura y complementar los estudios que nosotros venimos realizando para dar a conocer nuestra cosmovisión. Tenemos la esperanza de que esto promueva el arraigo a nuestra tierra y el derecho a la identidad originaria” expresó.
Por su parte, Víctor Vargas es autor del libro “Mi Sangre Yagán”, editado en 2017 por la Editora Cultura Tierra del Fuego y trabaja en el Museo del Fin del Mundo de Ushuaia, desde donde promueve mediante charlas e investigaciones, la cultura e historia de su pueblo. “Esto se trata de unir el pasado con el presente. Los yaganes son la comunidad humana que habitó de forma permanente la parte más al sur de todo el continente.
En cuanto a José González Calderón, reside en Puerto Williams, Chile y cabe destacar que es sobrino de Cristina Calderón, quien fue declara tesoro humano vivo, ya que es la última hablante nativa viva de su lengua yagán. Este año, ha sido declarado por la ONU el año internacional de las lenguas indígenas.
A haunting sound captured by researchers could help monitor changes to Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf from afar. Extremely sensitive sensors were buried two metres under the surface to capture ‘seismic motions’. Winds blowing across the icy surface create vibrations, producing a ‘near-constant set of seismic tones’, according to the study in Geophysical Research Letters. The frequency is too low to be heard by human ears and, according to the American Geophysical Union, it was only made audible by speeding up the recording about 1,200 times
Summertime is for road trips.Atlas Obscura and All Things Considered are traveling up the West Coast, from California to Washington, in search of “hidden wonders” — unique but overlooked people and places.
It’s a little before 5:00 on a summer morning, and Matt Mikkelsen stands not so far down a trail in the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington’s Olympic National Park. In the dense forest, dominated by massive Sitka spruce trees dripping with tangles of moss, Mikkelsen has just set up a tripod, topped not with a camera but with a disembodied black foam head.
The head is actually an unusual microphone — which Mikkelsen lovingly refers to as “Fritz” — and he is using it to record the dawn chorus, the time when the forest wakes, and the chirps and hiccups of the night give way to the trilling, ecstatic reveille of the rain forest’s birds. (To fully experience what this sounds like, listen to the audio version of this story — available above — using earbuds.)
Mikkelsen, an audio technician and recording specialist, works with a nonprofit called One Square Inch of Silence, founded by his mentor, audio ecologist Gordon Hempton. Its purpose is to promote the preservation of quiet places — that is, places without human-made sounds.
Protecting wilderness, they argue, means more than guarding against development and industry, but also keeping spaces free of noise pollution — including the sound of aircraft far overhead — that can affect the people who visit these places and the wildlife that calls them home.
In 2005, when Hempton founded One Square Inch of Silence, he designated a spot, a few miles up the Hoh River Trail into the rain forest, the quietest place in the U.S. and marked it with a small, red stone.
Mikkelsen, 24, is tall and slim, with a long auburn beard. His friends call him “Sasquatch,” but that doesn’t seem to suit his gentle, quiet demeanor.
“Even though protecting 1 square inch seems like a very small, insignificant amount of space,” he explains, “due to the nature of sound and silence, it’s preserving this whole ecosystem.”
If that inch stays quiet, that means that the entire valley, and miles around it, will be similarly intact and free of intrusive noise. Hempton defines a naturally quiet place as one where there are 15 minutes of non-human-made sound. He estimates that there are fewer than 10 such places in the U.S.
As Mikkelsen adjusts the sensitivity of his recording, the dawn chorus seems to explode around the valley.
“In a forest like this, it’s so dense, I can only see maybe 50 yards in one direction, if you’re lucky,” he says. “But I can hear for miles.”
That sense, of how far you can hear, is known as your auditory horizon, and much of the time — indoors or in a city, for example — it doesn’t extend very far. But in the forest, with eyes closed and a little focus, it sprawls.
“In a place like this your auditory horizon isn’t just 1 or 2 miles,” he says. “You can hear everything that’s happening in this valley. … It’s like we’re listening to 5 miles or 10 miles around us right now. It’s crazy.”
Mikkelsen then offers headphones connected to Fritz, so visitors can hear what Fritz’s hypersensitive ears are picking up. The sensation is more than mere amplification, because you can still perceive the direction and distance of each twitter and rustle, thanks to Fritz’s ears.
“When you listen to it through a microphone system like this,” he says, “you all of a sudden realize that you’re listening to hundreds, if not thousands, of birds.”
It’s like your own hearing, enhanced to an impossibly intimate level.
But since One Square Inch of Silence was established, the Hoh Rain Forest has gotten louder, through increased air traffic and the testing of loud Navy jets nearby.
Now, Hempton and Mikkelsen are planning to make One Square Inch part of a larger effort to identify, designate and protect quiet places like it around the world.
“Just the fact that this place exists is enough to give me hope for the world,” Mikkelsen says, softly. “And I think that’s the reason why we conserve wilderness in the first place.”
Samir S. Patel is deputy editor of Atlas Obscura.
Maureen Pao edited the Web story. Dylan Thuras, a founder of Atlas Obscura, Matt Ozug, Renita Jablonski and Michael May reported, produced and edited the audio story.
Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
As part of its birthday’s activities, the Magallanes University organized a grateful tribute to the last yagan speaker, Cristina Calderón. Photograph of Luisa Villablanca
For the 53rd birthday of the Magallanes University(UMAG), the regional department of high studies rendered this thursday a rightful homage to Cristina Calderón, National Living Treasure ofyagán people, and representative of the « canoera » culture (nomadic people of the south Magellan Strait channels) of the extreme south of Chile.
The ceremony took place on the Patagonian Institute, and conducted by the rector of the UMAG, Juan Oyarzo, accompanied by the Intendant of Magallanes y Antártica Chilena, Jorge Flies.
The highest regional authority congratulate the university for this “rightful tribute” attributed to Cristina Calderón. “It is in fact what we have to do as a community. We are lucky to have Cristina with us. We are really pleased that she has been able to come with her daughter and has been able to receive our displays of affection. We all agree that this tribute we rendered is important to her, recognized National Living Treasure by the UNESCO.”, the intendant Flies stated.
The chief of the Regional Government considers as a real gift to give Cristina Calderon the possibility to express herself in her’s mother tongue. In this sense, and to preserve the yagán language, Flies announced that he had started to solicit the linguist Oscar Aguilera, that who realised great worksabout the kawésqar language, to make, with Calderon, a similar work for the benefit of the safeguarding of this language.
For his part, the UMAG rector, Juan Oyarzo, got very emotional at the end of the ceremony. “I’m very touched to have had the opportunity to lead this event and to have been able to say a few words to “la abuela” Cristina this afternoon”, Oyarzo said and added “It’s good to pay these tributes as long as she’s alive. But we also have a sense of guilt from an era in which people were blind to the consequences of their acts against Yagan people. We are now seeing the impacts : an ethnic group and a language are at the point of disappearing”.
“I am full of emotion because, although late in coming, we have reached to pay this tribute,but especially because we are an inclusive university that pretend to link all localities likePuerto Williams, Puerto Natales and Porvenir, where we also have university centres.”, the rector commented. He announced that he committed himself, as an academic, to support the intentions of a Cristina’s niece, also present to this tribute and who whishes to study the Pedagogy in Early Education.
The authorities undertake to ensure the governance of the possibility, for Cristina Calderón, to teach her language and thus to preserve and diffuse a part of her culture with the rest of the Magellanic community.
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