6.1 What Is Landscape?
In trying to define the notion of ‘landscape’, several options emerge. Reference CrystalCrystal (1990) defines ‘landscape’ as the natural, visual features of an area of land such as mountains, trees, rocks, lakes, rivers, sand, grass, and so on. These features may not have been significantly changed by human activity and, thus, constitute the landscape for centuries (Reference CrystalCrystal, 1990, p. 412). In such a definition, the landscape is the visual manifestation and observation of territories and territorial identities. Another theme that arises when we try to define the concept of ‘landscape’ is that landscapes are seen as the backdrop to which human activities occur in. For instance, Reference ReedReed (1990) defines landscape as ‘the external world in which men and women have carried on the everyday business of their lives from the remotest periods of pre-history down to the present’ (Reference ReedReed, 1990, p. xii). From this definition, it is evident that landscapes reflect the interrelationships between people and their environments over the course of human history. Landscapes provide, therefore, the backdrop to which people live their lives.
The intersection between nature and man is also evident in the definition provided by the European Landscape Convention (ELC), which was the first international treaty to be exclusively devoted to the European landscape. The ELC defines landscape as ‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’ (Council of Europe, 2000, p. 12). This definition, as Reference Dejeant-PonsDejeant-Pons (2006) argues, is a holistic view and ultimately links the landscape to the advancement of four elements of sustainable development: nature, culture, society, and economy. Extending beyond the realm of just physical characteristics of a space, Reference Antrop, Howard, Thompson and WatertonAntrop (2013) notes that the word ‘landscape’ has also become a metaphor to describe many human activities today, as in the case of media landscape or political landscape. ‘Landscape’ can also have adjectives attached to it, for instance, natural landscape or cultural landscape, and urban landscape or rural landscape. Because of the multiple meanings and different focuses of scholars studying the landscape, it is no surprise that ‘the approaches to landscape are very broad and not always clearly defined’, especially when people occupying the same piece of land ‘see different landscapes’ (Reference Antrop, Howard, Thompson and WatertonAntrop, 2013, p. 13). The meaning of ‘landscape’ thus varies according to the background and contexts of the people who inhabit it. Due to the relationships that human beings have with the landscape, we are not only able to study it using objective and scientific methods, but we also can apply approaches taking into account subjective aspects, and delve into the feelings, perceptions, and meanings people associate with landscapes (Reference Hendriks and StobbelaarHendriks & Stobbelaar, 2003; Reference TilleyTilley, 2006; Reference Taylor, Taylor and LennonTaylor, 2012; Reference Moore and WhelanMoore & Whelan, 2016).
‘Landscape’ does not just refer to the characteristics of the physical or geographical environment. Reference David, Thomas, David and ThomasDavid and Thomas (2008, p. 35) argued that, from the mid- to late 1980s, ‘landscape’ began to be seen as something more than ‘environment’, and scholars began to take into account the fact that humans engaged with their physical surroundings socially and culturally as much as environmentallyFootnote 1. Any research on landscape would, then, involve not just the visible features of the physical land, but also ‘the spirits of the land and the waters and the skies that others may not know’ (Reference David, Thomas, David and ThomasDavid & Thomas, 2008, p. 35). The landscape is, therefore, not just a setting in which we live our lives, but also a social and cultural creation in which we exist. A holistic assessment of the landscape enables us to see how social identity may be forged in that space. The landscape, therefore, has social and cultural values on top of its physical characteristics, and has to be treated and studied as such. Reference TorrenceTorrence (2002, p. 766) summarises the all-encompassing nature of landscape as follows.
[B]y definition, the term ‘landscape’ takes in all physical and natural components of the terrestrial environment. […] it should be combined with ‘seascape’ […] to encompass adequately the settings where human behaviour took place. Adding ‘cultural’ to land- and seascapes emphasises the role of the individuals who conceptualised these spaces and actively created and modified them in culturally specific ways.
The landscape is a meaningful place to the people that live in it. A socioculturally constructed landscape may or may not contain any visible human artefactual remains or prominent natural features. Nonetheless, it is an important space and place for the local society, because locals engage socially with it. The significance of a place, therefore, lies not only in the physical features, but also in the associated social, cultural, or even spiritual values of the place itself.
In toponymy, the relationship between place names and the landscape is very strong, especially for ancient toponyms. As we have discussed in earlier chapters, places, in prehistoric times, were generally named after specific features of the landscape, such as natural resources (i.e., water, food, animals, stone, etc.) and the hydro-geo-morphological structure of the landscape encompassing the places themselves. Examples of the latter include the location of caves to be used as shelters or places with good water, essential to the survival of people. Conversely, places were also named after the bad or swampy water attested there, in order to avoid them. The discussion of Squaneto in Chapter 3Footnote 2 and the *alb- toponymic system analysed in Chapter 4Footnote 3 illustrate very clearly how early people named places according to primary goods for survival, such as water. Toponyms, by alluding to and describing the related landscapes, helped people to orientate themselves in these spaces and, in the absence of drawing tools and writing systems, facilitated the sketching of a mental, oral, and ideal map of their territory. Prehistoric place names allowed the Stone Age people to navigate around their surroundings and to refer to them with precision and accuracy. Humans also adapted to their environment through the practice of naming places after real features of the landscape, which ultimately helped them to navigate the uncharted prehistoric world. Reference Ucko and LaytonUcko and Layton (2005) argued that the relationship between landscape and humans is that landscape is usually represented as an ecological system ‘to which human behaviour must adapt’ (p. 8). The christening of places after natural resources and salient attributes of the landscape can be considered as a linguistic and geographic adaptation to the surroundings, and helped humans to stay alive in prehistoric times.
In this chapter, we will show how the landscape, and some of the disciplines studying it, particularly landscape archaeology, are useful to the reconstruction of the origins of toponyms. In particular, the analysis of elements and features of the landscape enables the toponymist to confirm or disprove the possible etymologies of prehistoric place names. Moreover, we will show how interdisciplinary approaches in studying the landscape, combining the physical, natural environment, and sometimes even the spiritual domain, enrich our understanding of toponymy and also of the communities and cultures.
6.2 Landscape Archaeology and Toponymy
Research on the landscape can involve many disciplines, just as the study of toponyms does. Common fields associated with the landscape include landscape archaeology, landscape architecture, landscape ecology, geology, physical geography, human geography, cultural geography, historical geography, history, urban planning, cartography, topography, and, increasingly, the use and practice of geographic information systems (GIS) (cf. Chapters 7 and 10). Landscape archaeology is the study of the past use of the landscape, determined by archaeological findings. Some scholars have argued that the study of landscape archaeology could have begun with the discipline of archaeology itself (Reference Maschner, Marler, David and ThomasMaschner & Marler, 2008, p. 109), because the space in which we find archaeological remains would always constitute the landscape.Footnote 4 The discipline tries to interpret the excavated factual remains, which are material traces left behind by past civilisations, and to use these interpretations as the basis for understanding what the landscape was like or how it was used in the past. The notion of ‘landscape archaeology’ was perhaps first delineated and mentioned by the British scholars Mick Aston and Trevor Rowley in 1974. Both authors recognise that the landscape is not just a natural ‘scenery’, but an artefact rich in history and layering.
The landscape is a palimpsest on to which each generation inscribed its own impressions and removes some of the marks of earlier generations. Constructions of one age are often overlain, modified or erased by the work of another. The present patchwork nature of settlement and patterns of agriculture has evolved as a result of thousands of years of human endeavour, producing a landscape which possesses not only a beauty associated with long and slow development, but an inexhaustible store of information about many kinds of human activities in the past.
As seen from this quote, the landscape features of the past may not be visible today. They may have been eroded away, buried, or modified either by natural hydro-geo-morphological processes (e.g., coastal erosion, alluviation) or by human activities (e.g., the flattening of a hill, deforestation). Yet, the archaeological remains in the landscape can help us to reconstruct its development over time, and to understand the structure of past human settlements (and the related activities) in a specific area. Conversely, there are also cases in which there is a lack of archaeological findings in a particular landscape. In this context, a useful reading can be found in Reference IlvesIlves (2006), who writes about maritime landing sites in the Estonian-Swedish landscape (located along the coast of northwest Estonia, where a sizeable Swedish population lived for years before the Second World War). As Ilves notes, maritime landing sites, or passage points between land and water, are, like many other sites in landscape archaeology, ‘relatively invisible’ (Reference IlvesIlves, 2006, p. 95). To this end, the scholar proposes the use of toponyms in providing clues on archaeological sites located along coasts, a method that was up till then uncommon in Estonian maritime archaeology. Ilves details a number of maritime places in the Estonian-Swedish landscape that served as landing sites, grouping them into categories such as place names indicating former landing sites (and whose use and related meanings later changed), toponyms marking coastal locations for landing, and what she terms as ‘chapel’ names (Reference IlvesIlves, 2006, p. 97), that is, place names that allude to the sea and seafaring generally rather than specifically and might have been close to coasts where the ships landed.
Landscape archaeology is, naturally, a field related to historical geography, which also deals with changes to the landscape over time. It is worth noting that contemporary historical geography is more concerned with the recent past (Reference JonesJones, 2004), as opposed to the possibly prehistoric and long-term focus of landscape archaeology. Historical geography, by definition, often relies on historical data (i.e., written documents, archival sources), and it focusses mainly on urban contexts, while landscape archaeology focusses on archaeological findings (such as monuments, buildings, houses, writings on stones or walls, jewellery, and other artefacts) and more (but not exclusively) on rural contexts. Historical geography studies the economic, social, and political forces determining geographical (and political-geographical) changes, for example, how the shift of government from colonial times to modern-day Singapore has affected the street names of the city, or how certain political motivations modify the geography of a region (see more in Chapters 7 and 8) (Reference Branton, Gaimster and MajewskiBranton, 2009). What this means is that landscape archaeology and its approaches investigate the connections between past human behaviours (which can be inferred through excavated remains) and the physical (and sometimes social) spaces in which they occurred.
In relation to toponymy, landscape archaeology is particularly useful in contributing to the analysis of places with a remote (or even prehistoric) name, some of which do not exist anymore. Unearthing possible archaeological and paleo-anthropological remains of a prehistoric settlement is essential in highlighting the diachronic development of the landscape features and/or hydro-geo-morphological aspects that can help confirm or disprove etymological hypotheses on the place name from that particular area.
6.3 Landscape Archaeology and Toponymy Case Studies
6.3.1 Pareto
A very interesting case study detailing how the application of landscape archaeology is particularly useful in toponymy is the name of the village of Pareto, located in Piedmont, northwest Italy, in the province of Alessandria (see Figure 6.1). Pareto, as a place name, has been incorrectly reconstructed, over time, by both local speakers and scholars, who falsely believed that the name could be explained as Pareto < Italian Pereto < Late Latin Peretum/Piretum < Late Latin Peretus/Piretus < Latin pĭrus (‘pear tree’) + -etum (suffix used in toponyms to mean ‘village’, or ‘place’) ‘the village of the pear trees’, or ‘the place of the pear trees’. The reconstruction is based on the assumption that the name derives from the Latin pĭrus ‘pear tree’, and the Italian pero ‘pear tree’. Speakers and scholars postulate that a possible dialectal change occurred, over time, from -er- to -ar-, probably in the passage between Late Latin and Vernacular Italian, and thus Pereto changed into Pareto to ‘fit in’ with the local dialect (DTI, 1999, cited in Reference Perono CacciafocoPerono Cacciafoco, 2014, p. 92). Nonetheless, this postulation may be wrong because, as we’ll see in a moment, the -ar- segment could be considered the original one (belonging to the original root of the toponym and actually preserved in the current form of the name) and not a dialectal innovation, while the -er- segment, as well as the connection with the notion of ‘pear tree’, could represent a paretymological explanation. Indeed, the etymological reconstruction connected with Latin pĭrus and Italian pero is configurable as a bona fide toponymic paretymology (cf. Chapter 3) and also has an attestation of its influence and acceptance, over time, on the coat of arms of the village, which depicts a pear tree alongside a medieval tower (Figure 6.1). A careful examination of the historical landscape of the place provides, instead, evidence for a landscape-informed etymology of the toponym.
Figure 6.1 Position and coat of arms of the Pareto municipality
Landscape archaeology research in the area and an analysis of local historical archival documents and chronicles show that orchards of pear trees have never been attested in Pareto. Moreover, the village is located at the top of a steep hill dominating the surrounding territory, and its microclimate is not favourable for the growth of pear trees. Conversely, the place was used (according to archaeological and paleo-anthropological relics found in the area) by humans in prehistoric times as a shelter from dangerous animals, possibly bears and wolves. It is precisely from this geo-morphological characteristic that Pareto took its name. The toponym derives from a reference to the altitude of the village and to its ‘stony nature’, given that the village is located on a steep hill. This relationship to ‘stone’ and to the ‘impervious faces of the hill’ is indicated through the Proto-Indo European (then (Proto-)Celtic) root of the place name, *br-, or *bar-, which means ‘rock, mountain, cliff, hill, face of a mount’ and which, over time, shifted to *par-. This interpretation would not have been possible without the assessment of evidence provided by the findings from landscape studies. Hence, a more accurate etymological reconstruction of the place name Pareto, based on its geo-morphology, is as follows.
The toponymic reconstruction of the name Pareto involves the change of the initial voiced bilabial stop, *b-, to the voiceless bilabial stop, p-. The passage from *b- to p- happened over time and is already attested in Latin, for example, in the word pariēs, ‘rock face/wall’, or ‘rock’, and the Italian word parete, ‘rock face’, or ‘wall’ (the reflex of the Latin form), which derives from the root *br-/*bar-. This provides a confirmation inherent in the derivation of Pareto from the root *br-/*bar- (which later became *par- in some Indo-European languages, meaning ‘rock’, or ‘mountain’, or, ‘cliff’ or ‘hill’, or ‘face of a mount’). Additional evidence that supports this reconstruction of Pareto as ‘place located on a hill/cliff’ is derived from the comparison with other Italian place names etymologically connected with the root *br-/*bar, such as Parétola, a hamlet of the Zeri municipality (Tuscany, central Italy), whose denomination derives from Latin pariēs ‘steep terrain, sheer rock or overhanging cliff’ (Reference PellegriniPellegrini, 2008, p. 194). Thus, among others, Parétola, like Pareto, has its etymological origins in the prehistoric and pre-Latin root of *br-/*bar-, which indicates the ‘rocky’ nature of a cliff or hill.
Nonetheless, over time, speakers were involved in a linguistic misunderstanding about the possible origins of the place name Pareto and did not make, in their limited linguistic competence, the right connection between the place name and the Italian word parete (‘rock face’, or ‘wall’), possibly because Pareto is in Italian a masculine singular name, while parete is a feminine singular word, and the speakers did not connect the two lexemes. People took, therefore, the route of another erroneous interpretation-based onanalogy of the Italian word pero ‘pear tree’, which, according to them, was phonetically compatible with Pareto, despite the difference in the root vowel (/e/ vs. /a/), and which is, like Pareto, a masculine singular word (while in Latin pĭrus is a feminine singular word). Conversely, they did not consider the geo-morphological characteristics of the territory and the landscape of the area, which corroborate the reconstruction of the prehistoric, pre-Latin (Celtic and, ultimately, Proto-Indo-European) linguistic layer linked to the root *br-/*bar-, describing, in the case of Pareto, the altitude and position of the village on the top of its hill and not connected with a phytonym (from Ancient Greek phytón [φυτόν] ‘plant’, and ónoma [ὄνομα] ‘name’).
The diachronic analysis of a landscape and the historical assessment of the developments of a territory over time, therefore, enable us to ascertain or at least to corroborate the exactness of the etymological reconstructions of place names. In the case of Pareto, we found that the notion of the presence of pear orchards or pear trees in the locality and thus the gloss of the place name as ‘the village of the pear trees’ are incorrect and, at the toponymic level, they produce an evident paretymology. This led us to search for a more accurate and plausible explanation of the place name and to etymologically reconstruct its root as being *br-/*bar-. This stem reflects the hydro-geo-morphology of the landscape of the place and, in particular, the characteristic of the village of being located at the top of a hill (which is ‘stony’ in nature). This is an example of how the geo-morphology of the landscape, in this case ‘rocky’ and ‘stony’, has provided the place with its name (at the etymological and semantic levels), and the name itself, Pareto, indicates something connected with ‘rock’, or ‘stone’, derived from the Indo-European root *br-/*bar-.
6.3.2 Igbominaland and Badagry
Reference Aleru and AlabiAleru and Alabi (2010) provide an interesting example from the African context on how a study of the local toponymy can inform ‘cultural, historical and archaeological reconstructions’ (p. 151), facilitating therefore the analysis of past uses of the landscape and the customs of the people living in a specific territory. The scholars draw on their ethnographic and archaeological investigations from two areas in Yorubaland, in southwest Nigeria: Igbominaland and the Badagry coastal area (see Figure 6.2).
Figure 6.2 Map of Nigeria showing the area of the study by Reference Aleru and AlabiAleru and Alabi (2010)
The authors, through an analysis of a number of settlements and based on past oral accounts and archaeological surveys, found that people in these areas engaged in a number of different economic activities, like farming, hunting, iron working, weaving, dyeing, bronze casting, and bead-making. These activities, and their related trades, were reflected in local place names. For example, Odó Ide ‘bronze mortar’, a settlement at Idoba, Igbominaland, is a direct reference to the bronze casting industry previously in the town. The authors report finding evidence of iron working in two-thirds of the settlements in Igbominaland, particularly in hill slope areas. Likewise, the name of the town Okotóníyún ‘farm with beads’ implies that both farming and the manufacturing of beads were the main economic activities of this settlement.
Toponyms provide us with valuable hints that aid the reconstruction of both past events and aspects of cultural history connected with the different stages of development of the landscapes. Yet, in order to accept these clues as indicating historical facts, we have to use complementary historical data from ethnographic and archaeological sources, such as oral traditions and excavations. The study by Reference Aleru and AlabiAleru and Alabi (2010) is, indeed, also a useful example of how ethnographic methods are utilised in the study of landscape toponymy. Like many communities around the world, Yorubaland is a largely oral-word society. It is not surprising, therefore, that local oral traditions also feature strongly in the study of toponyms. In the absence of written records, it is by relying on oral traditions that scholars are often able to trace the naming processes. Reference Aleru and AlabiAleru and Alabi (2010, p. 158) collected the oral accounts inherent in settlements in the Badagry area. What they were able to find was that early settlements in this territory were built by refugees fleeing the civil unrest due to the Dahomey Wars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 5 Thus, for instance, the Igbogbélé people were displaced by the wars and settled by the ocean in a place they named Àfikú, meaning ‘only death could kill us here’. The name comes from their perception of safety from raids in their new location. From there, they later moved to their current territory, naming the place Igbogbélé ‘bush of permanent settlement’. The glosses of these names imply first, in the name Àfikú, that these people were seeking refuge away from their original home, which they hoped to find in their new settlement. It appears that the Igbogbélé people would not want to leave their new home, and that only death could part them from Àfikú, as indicated by the meaning of the place name. In Igbogbélé, the same people believed that they had finally found a location where they were no longer victims of wars and, thus, a place of permanent residency, as indicated by the notion of ‘permanent settlement’. This provides the researchers with a good case study, particularly from a non-Euro-American context, on how landscape archaeology, toponymy, and oral traditions intersect methodologically and enhance our understanding of the landscape, place names, and cultural history of people all over the world.
6.3.3 The Abui from Alor Island
How studies on the landscape can integrate both the physical/natural and social environments, and even the cultural and religious realms, can be tracked through an investigation of the relationship between the Abui landscape and toponyms. As mentioned in Chapters 1 and 4, the Abui are a Papuan aboriginal people living on Alor Island (Alor-Pantar archipelago, Timor area) in southeast Indonesia. They speak Abui, a Papuan language, which was undocumented and endangered until very recently. The Abui community of Takalelàng lives on the northern slopes of Alor Island, falling to the coast of the Banda Sea (see Figure 6.3). In the absence of detailed cartographic, topographic, and toponymic documentation, Reference Kratochvíl, Delpada and Perono CacciafocoKratochvíl, Delpada, and Perono Cacciafoco (2016) created a database of 288 Abui landscape terms. The lexemes were collected through extensive language documentation fieldwork and based on reconstructed oral traditions recorded in collaboration with local Abui consultants. After these terms were collected, they were stored in a database and annotated according to their possible etymology, the landscape features they describe, and, where possible, the oral-traditional narratives related to the mapped landscape lexemes.
Figure 6.3 A view of the Takalelàng area from the northeast, generated using Google Earth. This picture illustrates the basic landscape categories in Takalelàng, such as villages located at the top of the mountains, trading places (ailol) along the coast, and resting places (lulang)
Similar to the alba-type example in Chapter 4, where we explained how early European settlements were, generally, named after important features of the landscape (in the case of Alba, the water resource), the denominations of the Abui villages often derive from natural landscape features. These features include ravines (bung), hills (miti) and their peaks (fuung), plains (fuui), and streams (lu), among others. Table 6.1 lists examples of toponyms based on these landscape features.
Table 6.1 Abui toponyms based on landscape features (Kratochvíl et al., 2016)
| Toponym | English gloss | Type | Onomastic source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meebung/Meabuung | mango ravine | village |
|
| Fuung Afeng | peak village | village |
|
| Fe Fuui | pig plain | village |
|
| Fuui Mia | plain at | village | landscape feature (plain) |
| Lu Meelang (Lu Melang) | river village | village |
|
As we can see, Abui toponyms markedly make reference to physical landscape features, as mentioned above, in association with the natural resources connected with each specific part of the landscape. Horticultural-based place names derived from tree names are common in the Abui landscape. Because (Due to the fact that) the Papuan people on Alor Island are organised as an agricultural society growing its own crops, this reliance on horticultural and agricultural sources is also reflected in their toponyms. Many Abui place names also derive from trees and crops that are commonly found in the natural landscape and are perceived as valuable, such as mea ‘mango’, kalang ‘Cussambium’, fiyaai ‘candlenut’, and kanaai ‘Canarium’, among others (see Table 6.2).
Table 6.2 Abui toponyms based on agricultural and horticultural sources
| Toponym | English gloss | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Meebung/Meabuung | mango ravine | village |
| Mea Meelang (Mea Melang) | mango village | village |
| Mea Kilikil | idle mango | field |
| Kalang Meelang (Kalang Melang) | Cussambium village | village |
| Kalang Maasang | Cussambium sanctuary | village |
| Kalang Watika | Cussambium on slope | field |
| Fiyaai Lelang | lit. ‘candlenut relatives’ | village |
| Fiyaai Mea | lit. ‘mango candlenut’ | field |
| Kanaai Loohu | Canarium tall | garden |
| Kanaai Pee/a | Canarium near | village |
| Kanaafeng | Canarium village | village |
| Kanaaisua | three Canarium | valley |
| Padak Kanai | mud Canarium | field |
| Karkanaai | ten Canarium | valley |
It is worth noting that, in toponyms such as Meebung/Meabuung ‘mango ravine’ and Kalang Watika ‘Cussambium on slope’, we observe a compounding between the agricultural/horticultural resource + the physical landscape category in a single place name. As a testament to the saliency of agricultural or horticultural sources in the landscape, it is also possible to find place names that incorporate two crops, such as Fiyaai Mea, which translates into ‘mango candlenut’, and Keela Kanaai ‘bamboo Canarium’ (see Table 6.4). This is probably due to the existence of multiple crops in the same place. In the Abui territory, many human settlements, villages, localities, and sanctuaries, and even ritual dance places (which are the only remainder of previous, older inhabited centres), are named after agricultural and horticultural crops, for example, Mea Meelang (Mea Melang) ‘mango village’. The combination of numeral + commodity in names such as Kanaaisua ‘three Canarium’ and Karkanaai ‘ten Canarium’ suggests that quantity was also salient in the mental map of the local speakers and, potentially, even a single tree could have become a landmark. It is also worth mentioning that, because the Abui people share a close relationship with their landscape and the related crops, the qualities of these crops can in turn be embedded into the place names. These qualities describe aspects like height, spatial-distance awareness, and even negative traits, for example, Kanaai Loohu ‘Canarium tall’, Kanaai Pee/a ‘Canarium near’, and Mea Kilikil ‘idleFootnote 6 mango’. Abui toponyms serve therefore as descriptors of the crops, and by implication they represent features of the physical and sociocultural landscapes where these crops are cultivated.
Table 6.3 A list of common crops used in the naming of places on Alor Island
| Crop | English gloss and genus | Toponym count |
|---|---|---|
| mea | ‘mango’ (Mangifera indica) | 9 |
| kanaai | ‘canarium’ (Canarium indicum) | 8 |
| wata | ‘coconut’ (Cocos nucifera) | 6 |
| tamal | ‘tamarind’ (Tamarindus indica) | 5 |
| kalang | ‘cussambium tree’ (Schleichera oleosa) | 4 |
| muur | ‘lemon’ (Citrus limon) | 4 |
| daa | ‘cassava’ (Manihot esculenta) | 2 |
| fiyaai | ‘candlenut’ (Aleurites moluccanus) | 2 |
| soong | ‘jackfruit’ (Artocarpus heterophyllus) | 2 |
| ayak | ‘rice’ (Oryza sativa) | 1 |
Table 6.4 Abui toponyms based on useful plants
| Toponym | English gloss | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Kalang Anu | Cussambium market | trading place |
| Kalangfat(i) | Cussambium millet | coastal trading village |
| Karetak Afeeng | eucalyptus village | village |
| Futing Maai | yard bamboo | plant cluster |
| Tifool ya | bamboo water | spring |
| Keela Kanaai | bamboo Canarium | valley |
| Kawaaka Loohu | ironwood tall | garden |
| Mitaai Uwo | blackboard tree below | ridge garden |
| Mitaai Pee | blackboard tree near | ridge garden |
| Kafiel Meelang (Kafiel Melang) | cactus village | village |
The findings by Reference Lim and Perono CacciafocoLim and Perono Cacciafoco (2020b) also show that toponyms on Alor Island are largely ‘transparent’ in their meanings. The authors collected over forty toponyms to determine the relationship(s) that link(s) plant species to Abui place names. The most common crops used in toponyms in that study are shown in Table 6.3.
Another source for place names is represented by the plants that are useful in everyday life, usually in building houses (Table 6.4). The most common are Cussambium (kalang), bamboo (maai, tifool, keela), ironwood (laa, kawaaka), blackboard tree (mitaai), and cactus (kafiel). Kafiel is, interestingly, used as a natural barrier to protect and fence off village walls. A number of toponyms connected with these plants contain two phytonyms in their names: a useful plant and an agricultural or horticultural crop (e.g., Kalangfat[i] ‘Cussambium millet’ and Keela Kanaai ‘bamboo Canarium’). Other names show the intersection of the physical environment and human settlements, and describe anthropic facilities such as markets and villages (e.g., Kalang Anu ‘Cussambium market’, Karetak Afeeng ‘eucalyptus village’, Kafiel Meelang ‘cactus village’). Some of these toponyms also indicate the distance and/or the direction of a named place from and/or in relation to the connected useful plant, as highlighted in Mitaai Uwo ‘blackboard tree below’ and Mitaai Pee ‘blackboard tree near’. As such, not only do these plants serve useful purposes in the daily lives of the Abui people, but they also function as landscape indicators after which places are named.
The above place names effectively illustrate the fact that the naming of localities depends on many aspects of the landscape or, more specifically, on the types of crops which are grown or can be found naturally in a territory, and on how an area in the wider landscape is good for human activities (and what purposes it serves, e.g., settlements). That is what Reference LevinsonLevinson (2008, p. 277) calls the ‘landscape affordance’.
Many of the Abui toponyms shown in the tables above refer to human settlements. In this case, we can see how representations of the natural landscape, be it via the hydro-geo-morphological features or agricultural and horticultural resources, are compounded with the lexicon describing human settlements, in a toponym. This highlights the interrelationship between nature and man in the intrinsic essence of the related place names.
The Takalelàng area is a modern ‘remnant’ of the so-called Meelang Talaama (Melang Talama) ‘six villages’ alliance, consisting of six small settlements interconnected with each other and located on their respective hilltops. The villages Kaleen (1), Murafang (2), Mahafuui (3), Lilafang (4), Fuungafeng (5), and Takalelàng (6) are shown in Figure 6.4. This alliance was part of a larger confederation of places known as Lembur that includes all the villages on the mountain top shown in Figure 6.4.
Figure 6.4 The view of villages in the Takalelàng area, showing their location and the parallel coastal trading places. Legend: Kaleen (1), Murafang (2), Mahafuui (3), Lilafang (4), Fuungafeng (5), Takalelàng (6), Ailol Kiding (7), Mas Beeka (8), Lu Meelang (Lu Melang) (9), Laakafeng (10), Leelawi (11), Kanaafeng (12), Fulful (13), Elahang (14), Al Meelang/Al Melang (Nurdin) (15), Kalangfati (16)
Abui villages and human settlements rely on a traditional system of governance according to which people are divided into societal groups, and every group has a specific political role. The Abui also have terms that refer to these groups. These terms specify where they live, as well as their roles (Table 6.5).
Table 6.5 Abui village governance terminology
| Abui term | Location | Role in the village |
|---|---|---|
| Poming | lower part, below | guardians of the entrance, in charge of individual warfare and trade, lay people, care for the maasang ‘sanctuary’, or ‘ritual dance place’ altar |
| Tamawaat | central part, centre | mediation, judges, governance of the village, peace makers |
| Hietang | higher part, above | warfare and defence |
The terminology for this system of governance is a productive source for names of settlement parts and other toponyms. According to the Abui speakers, people belonging to certain groups, which have specific roles, as illustrated in Table 6.5, occupy a ‘fixed space’ in a village. This results in the addition of modifiers to the names of settlements that distinguish the different spaces (and, by implication, the people occupying them) in the same village. Examples of modifiers include pee ‘neighbourhood’ (from pee/a ‘nearby’), hapoong ‘entering hill ridge’ (from the Abui term hapong ‘forehead’, or ‘in front of’), and taaha ‘upper hill ridge’ (from tāha ‘upper part’). These spatial and distal modifiers are, generally, added to the names of villages, and are a significant component of the naming process. For example, as seen in Chapter 5, Afena Poming means ‘village above’, or, more precisely, ‘hamlet above’. Other instances we have analysed in Chapter 5 are Afena Hapong ‘place located in front of the village’, or ‘village in front of’, more precisely glossed as ‘hamlet located in front of’; Afena Hietang ‘place located below the village’, or ‘village below’, or ‘lower village’, or, more precisely, ‘hamlet located below’; Lamang Tāha ‘village above’; and Lamang Uwo ‘village below’.
It is now worth pointing out that a number of Abui terms and concepts refer to human settlements and their constituent parts, which are highlighted in Table 6.6. As we detailed in Chapter 5, the widespread form/forms which describes/describe a settlement, both at the level of common lexicon and in local toponymy, afeng ~ afena (afeeng),Footnote 7 is/are derived from the Proto-Alor-Pantar proto-form *haban ‘village’ (Reference Holton, Klamer, Kratochvíl, Robinson and SchapperHolton et al., 2012, p. 96), and refers/refer to a ‘standard’ inhabited centre (while, when semantically specialised, in the form afena, they can indicate not only the notion of ‘village’, but the concept of ‘hamlet’, or a ‘minor’ locality dependent on another ‘major’ village). Generally, a larger village (which does not undergo the dichotomy ‘major’ vs. ‘minor’) is known as melang (meelang)Footnote 8. Traditionally, Abui inhabited centres are located on hilltops, resembling in a way ‘little fortresses’, with limited and protected means of access, blocked in the old days by stone walls, palisades, and bushes of thorny plants.
Table 6.6 Abui terms that denote human settlements or their parts
| Settlement | Definition |
|---|---|
| afeeng (afeng) | village (if afena, also ‘hamlet’) |
| futing | yard, or house yard |
| kameeng | three stones which are placed at the centre of a sanctuary or sacrifice place to symbolise three clans forming an alliance |
| kota | stone walls and terraces surrounding villages serving as fortifications or as a border of a house compound |
| maasang | sanctuary, or ritual dance place |
| maayang | the edge of a village, or ritual dance place where people gather |
| meelang (melang) | village |
Human settlements are generally connected with many different activities, such as farming or religious practices. Toponyms reflect many of these endeavours and, therefore, a number of different Abui terms denote some of them. Several villages and gardens, especially in the past, were fortified with walls to avoid theft and to be protected in war times, and some of these walls are still recognisable in several currently inhabited Abui centres, and in villages by now in ruin or long abandoned. Some Abui place names that denote human activities are found in Table 6.7.
Table 6.7 Abui toponyms derived from human activities
| Toponym | English gloss | Type | Onomastic source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kameeng Taaha (Kamēng Tāha) | sacrifice place above | village part | village features |
| Kameeng Faking | sacrifice place broken | field | village features |
| Kota Pee | wall near | garden | forward defence wall |
| Kalang Maasang | Cussambium sanctuary, or dance place | village |
|
6.4 Toponymy and Abui Myths and Legends
The discussion above has shown how the Abui physical and spiritual landscape consists of a combination of the physical contours of the lands, and of socially and culturally produced dimensions. Abui myths and legends are the core of the Abui oral traditions, which are called tira. The storytelling inherent in place names is generally supported by references to the physical environment. Oral traditions often tell of prominent rock formations, caves, water bodies, as well as places and human movements among them. It is possible to highlight, therefore, a blending between the physical world and the human dimension, which adds to the authenticity of the myths. The landscape, then, is not only environmental, but also social, and an important marker and keeper of cultural identity. In Abui, a foundation myth is regarded as correct only if the ideal movement of the characters through the landscape is illustrated by a real and existing place name sequence. Genealogical stories usually conceptualise temporal progressions as movements through the landscape. Therefore, the names of places and pathways provide a narrative organisational frame. An example of this can be seen in the legend of Mon Mot presented below, which the Abui believe is one of the foundation myths (a genealogy) from which the Abui communities descend. The story tells of a god-snake which attacked a number of Abui villages (among them Karuwal, Mon Tooting, Kabilelang, Fuihieng, Lelawi, Roolmeelang, Bukulaka, Miitingfuui, Komea, Lelangtukoi, Tabenaafeng, Fenalelang, Forintal, and Kawaaka Loohu) and killed everyone but one pregnant woman. This woman was able to escape and gave birth to twin sons who, in turn, killed the god-snake once they grew up. By killing the god-snake, they were able to bring back to life all the Abui people the primordial deity had killed. Thus, they became the new founders of the clans living in the Abui community today.
Mon Mot came down to Lelawi and killed everyone there. Just one pregnant woman was left and escaped into a cave. She stayed in a cave, or hole, with her dog. The dogs found water, and the woman followed. The woman gave birth to two twins and raised them in the cave, and taught them how to hunt, until they asked where their original village was. Both young men went to their original village, Lelawi, and rebuilt their house. Both young men built a treehouse on Kawaaka Loohu, where they stored various weapons and hid their mother. They went to Mon Mot’s village and challenged him to kill them. They first ran to Roolmeelang. Then, they ran down to Mitiingfuui. Then, they ran to Kawaaka Loohu. They climbed up to their tree house and found their mother scared. One of the twins, Luutangfaan, was more courageous. They killed the snake by throwing stones, axes, and pouring down [in its mouth] hot millet. They sliced the snake according to the instructions the snake gave them before dying. They made fire and dance, and their relatives returned. Their descendants live until the present in Nurdin and Mitiingfui.
As mentioned, oral traditions continually make reference to landscape features like rocks, caves, and water bodies, among others. In the Mon Mot legend, the story involves a cave, called Foring. The name of a connected, neighbouring cave is Anui Hieng. The protagonist runs into the cave in order to escape the giant snake. which is devouring everything in its path. It is also in the cave that she teaches her twins how to hunt. The story also tells of the movement among places, for instance, when the twins return to their original village, Lelawi, and when they escape from the snake, going from Roolmeelang to Mitiingfuui and then to Kawaaka Loohu. These are all toponyms that are still in use among the Abui, who know these places very well. The landscape and its place names are configurable, therefore, in Abui culture, also as mnemonic tools that the storyteller uses to facilitate the memorisation and declamation of the oral-traditional stories and the narrative process in itself. This, in turn, allows the listeners to understand the narration better, as they are deeply immersed in the story because they know and recognise the places that the narrator is talking about. In sum, knowledge of the landscape, reflected in the use of real toponyms and in the movement schema, gives authenticity to the stories and credibility to the storyteller. In Abui culture, it is fundamental that the official narrator of an oral-traditional tale is universally considered and accepted by the community as the ‘owner’ of the story; other storytellers can provide people with a myth or legend, but only the official ‘owner’ of the story knows all its details and is authorised to share it in its entirety (Reference Kratochvíl, Delpada and Perono CacciafocoKratochvíl et al., 2016; Reference Perono Cacciafoco and CavallaroPerono Cacciafoco & Cavallaro, 2017). These myths and legends establish and clarify the permanent bond between the landscape and its inhabitants, and are evidence of the fact that the landscape does not just consist of physical features, but has a deep human significance and a perennial anthropological value.
Place names can also be linked to local religions and the spiritual aspects of landscape. The story of Lamòling (Reference Perono Cacciafoco and CavallaroPerono Cacciafoco & Cavallaro, 2017; Reference Perono Cacciafoco and Cavallaro2018), mentioned in Chapters 1 and 5, is such an example for the Abui people. This Abui traditional religious myth is centred on how a local god, Lamòling, a deity (belonging to the polytheistic stage of the Abui religion) originally worshiped by the Abui people, was later replaced by the more powerful (and more recent) god Lahatàla (a sort of hypostasis of the Christian God). This replacement was due to the power shown to the Abui people by Lahatàla, and the consequent course of events, in which Lamòling was suddenly seen by the locals as a malevolent deity. In the story, Lamòling, as an act of retaliation for having been replaced with Lahatàla by the Abui people, killed an Abui child and offered the child’s body parts as a meal to the Abui people. The story is a metaphorical representation of a dramatic change in Abui religion, with a passage from polytheistic practices to Christianity, which was introduced on Alor Island in the sixteenth century. With the spread of Christianity on the island, the old animistic and polytheistic beliefs were abandoned, and the story shows several diachronic layers and variants which reflect the representation of the passage to the new, monotheistic religion. Lamòling, in the oral story told by speakers, originally appears as an animistic god (at the same time belonging to a polytheistic pantheon), in toto equal to the more recent Lahatàla, both in power and status among the Abui. The servants of Lamòling are represented as minor deities who are worshipped by the local people as well. The key difference between Lamòling and Lahatàla is that Lamòling is a metaphorical figure of the more ancient and primordial gods in Abui religion, who are replaced, over time, by a new (and ‘only’) god, Lahatàla. Indeed, despite the power of Lamòling and his prestige as an ancestral deity, with the introduction of Christianity on Alor Island, the relationship between the two gods shifted. The Abui people note that the dichotomy between Lamòling and Lahatàla became, over time, synonymous with that of the Christian God and the devil. Lamòling became a sort of representation of the devil in Christian traditions, the fierce enemy of the Christian God, Lahatàla. With this, we also see the effort, produced over time by Abui storytellers and spiritual leaders, to merge the different religious aspects of their story, from an animistic/polytheistic layer, to the representation of the cohabitation of polytheistic and monotheistic elements, to the prevalence of the monotheistic Christian religion and its dogma. The story, therefore, unfolds through different narrative layers depicting animistic and polytheistic stages and then the passage to the monotheistic one. The myth merges the two different diachronic layers in a coherent plot, to keep the narrative consistent and to allow the legend to be configured as an effective explanation of the Abui cultural identity and tradition in relation to the religious context.
As we saw with the legend of Mon Mot, the story of Lamòling and Lahatàla is also linked to existing places. Some of the names of those places mirror, in their evocativenessFootnote 9 and in their spiritual connections with the Abui people, the religious changes from Abui traditional beliefs to Christianity. For instance, in the village of Takpàla, located on the hill above the village of Takalelàng (the two villages are interconnected, and their inhabitants claim to be the same people and, actually, belong to the same families), there are two ritual and ceremonial houses, called Kolwàt and Kanurwàt (see Figure 6.5). These houses are uninhabited, being sacred places, and are the expression of a type of ‘architectural art’ in Abui culture (Reference Perono Cacciafoco and CavallaroPerono Cacciafoco & Cavallaro, 2017, p. 54). Kanurwàt, which means ‘white, bright, luminous, shining’ in Abui, is painted with a motif developed on a white background, while Kolwàt has a blackish geometrical pattern and means ‘dark’. It is worth noting that both houses existed prior to the arrival of Christianity on Alor. In the Lamòling story, the area in front of the houses was the location of a ritual known in Abui as karilìk hè hàk (shortened to karilìk), meaning ‘offer to the big old stones’.Footnote 10 These are three religious and apotropaic stones located on a central altar called Karilìk (the altar got its name from the ritual), which is still attested in its original position in the actual place. The houses and the altar were delimiting the religious area of the Takpàla village, and the Abui people, during their rituals, used to dance around them. The original significance of these houses is summarised by a metaphor: the ‘dark’ house represents the period in which the Abui people were following the ‘dark’ path of animism and polytheism. The ‘white’ house, conversely, symbolises the ‘light’ of the new religion (Christianity) and the ‘liberation’ of the Abui people from their ‘obscure’ religious past, represented by their friendship with the more ancient deity, Lamòling. Hence, the houses depict the passage from a ‘dark’ stage of religion, ‘championed’ by Lamòling, to the monotheistic spiritual stage portrayed by the metaphorical figure of Lahatàla, the Christian God.
Figure 6.5 The two Abui ritual and ceremonial houses, Kolwàt and Kanurwàt
Since being introduced to Christianity, the Abui now frame Kolwàt as the representation of the darkness derived from the absence of Christianity in their culture. Thus, in their opinion, the black house is a hypostasis of the lack of light coming from the right religious belief, which Christianity (now regarded as the ‘true religion’) provided to them. In contrast, the white house, Kanurwàt, is the architectural metaphor of the progresses in human history and the light brought to the Abui people by their new religion – Christianity. The names highlight the perception, by the Abui people, of the two houses as two different spiritual places, even though they are just a few metres apart, and signify the development and evolution of Abui history and cultural identity from a dark era to a brighter future.
One of the endings of the Lamòling and Lahatàla legend tells of how a weakened and defeated Lamòling leaves the Abui people and retreats to Pakulàng Hièng, a toponym which means ‘bad place’, in the neighbouring Kabola territory. The locality was named as such because it became the lair of the god, still threatening his old worshipers from a nearby territory, and the Abui people believe that Lamòling still ‘lives’ there. With Christianity gaining strength on Alor, the story behind Pakulàng Hièng was revised to give it a more ‘Christian flavour’. According to a newer version, indeed, Lamòling did not go to Pakulàng Hièng of his own choice (as a sort of voluntary exile), but was hurled from the sky by Lahatàla (now regarded as the Christian God), who sunk Lamòling to the rocks there as a punishment, and trapped him there for eternity. The similarity of this version of the story with the Christian story of Lucifer is evident, who, as the most beautiful angel of Heaven, rebelled against God and was sunk to Hell as an eternal punishment. Pakulàng Hièng is a place characterised by darkish, stony slopes with hollow passages. When the winds blow through these passages, the sound produced is believed by local people to be the atavistic lament of the god. Since it is considered a ‘bad place’, and is named as such, Pakulàng Hièng remains uninhabited to this day, both by the Kabola and Abui people.
A few themes emerge from the legends we have just analysed. First, the stories are firmly linked to existing places, and these places are real places that belong to the Abui landscape and have names known to all of the Abui people. Second, and more importantly, not only do these places have sociocultural significance to the Abui people, in the sense that Abui people believe that they are a core component of their human and spiritual landscape and an important part of their meta-history (Reference Perono Cacciafoco and CavallaroPerono Cacciafoco & Cavallaro, 2017, p. 54), but their names can also be infused with mythical and religious significance. The toponyms belonging to the Lamòling legend, such as Kolwàt, Kanurwàt, and Pakulàng Hièng, derive their names directly from the story itself, which emphasises the centrality of oral traditions in explaining Abui toponymy. Within the story we can also see the refashioning of the oral-traditional representation of a historical event due to the introduction of Christianity on Alor Island. Since then, these places are linked to the new (for the Abui people) monotheistic religion, and even serve as metaphors (in the case of Kolwàt and Kanurwàt) to illustrate how Christianity has ‘enlightened’ the local people. The newer spiritual meanings of specific place names, like Pakulàng Hièng, while still connected with the origins of the myth, have been further readapted to contain the Christian trope connected with the story of how God banished Lucifer to Hell, which is mirrored by Lahatàla’s action of exiling Lamòling to the rocks of Pakulàng Hièng.
6.5 Summary
While landscape is generally considered in association with the physical features of a territory, current approaches to its context, as we have shown in this chapter, take a holistic view of the landscape itself, to blend its physical, social, cultural, environmental, and even religious aspects, in order to enhance our understanding of its complex nature and systems. To this end, toponyms can also be useful tools which provide the researchers with insights into how people use or used the landscape. This is because toponyms reflect the physical environment and therefore unify the material, tangible world and the thoughts, perceptions, understandings, feelings, and values that people attach to their space. As Tilley aptly writes, ‘in a fundamental way names create landscape’ (Reference TilleyTilley, 1994, p. 19). Through naming, ‘a space becomes place, and a territory becomes landscape’ (Reference SeidlSeidl, 2008, p. 35). Landscape, in the final analysis, is not just physical and environmental space, but also represents the sociocultural and religious ways (as in the Abui case studies we have described above) according to which people perceive and shape their physical environments, which often change over time.
In the next chapter, we will look at historical geography, which was briefly mentioned at the start of this chapter, and at how this discipline improves our understanding of toponymy and of recent and contemporary changes to the landscape.
