Grahamland was first inhabited by Antarctic Indigenous Peoples, who arrived from South America around 10,000 BCE. From around 900 CE, the area was under the control of the Kingdom of K'athar, and was used by the K'atharans as a base for trading with South America. Toward the end of the 1700s, European colonists began to arrive in the Scotia Sea Islands, and in 1820, the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen landed on the Grahamlandic mainland, which made him the first European to sight and land on Antarctica.