HIDDEN PLACES AND CREOLE FORMS: NAMING THE BARBUDAN LANDSCAPE* |
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| Authors: | Riva Berleant-Schiller |
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| Institution: | RIVA BERLEANT-SCHILLER (Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook) is The Department of Anthropology, The University of Conecticut at Torrington, Torrington, CT 06790. Her research interests include the Caribbean region and systems of land and labor in the colonial Americas. She is now working on eighteenth-century Mahican-Moravian communities of the Hudson and Housatonic valleys. |
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| Abstract: | The decline of fieldwork in human geography in the United States is reflected in place name studies of the last 30 years, which have been founded on maps alone. Research in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles, demonstrates the importance of human informants and observations in the field for gathering toponymic information, and shows the axiom that place names alone are evidence of past landscapes and land uses to be unreliable. The study tests some accepted principles of naming against field observations and proposes the significance of creole language and diglossia in the place names of creole speech communities. |
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| Keywords: | Barbuda Caribbean region creole languages Lesser Antilles place names |
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