Alongside the aerial photography and the creation of the map base, we recorded oral microtoponymy. This was fascinating! Place names, especially hydronyms, carry traces of history and echoes of ancient, pre-literate times, hints of which can still be glimpsed through later layers of pronunciation. Hydronyms often outlast ethnic groups, but once introduced into a new linguistic environment, they are reinterpreted and take on altered sounds, resembling words with which they are associated. We traveled around the area of our photography—about 200 sq km—in a jeep, visiting every village. In each one, we looked for elders and toured the surroundings with them, recording every name for streams, clearings, marshes, and other local features. Then we sought out other village elders, recorded their versions, compared them, and discussed the differences. We found that a wealth of small place names had been passed down orally and had never been recorded on maps. In most villages, only one or two people still held this knowledge; in some places, we couldn’t find anyone. Many houses were abandoned, while others had been bought by seasonal residents who live outside these traditions. Local place names would enter a person’s memory in childhood and accompany them for life. For them to be preserved, people need to have activities in the village surroundings and a community to discuss or work with. Place names serve a practical purpose: they’re essential for identifying locations within a shared territory. Seasonal residents don’t engage in traditional activities around the forests and fields, other than perhaps gathering mushrooms and berries, so they don’t need these microtoponyms. As a result, an ancient oral toponymic tradition—largely unrecorded on maps—is disappearing before our eyes. In several villages, we found no remaining bearers of this knowledge, leaving blank spots on the map with only major features like rivers and villages labeled. I completed this work in 2007, and probably the last of the village elders whose stories we recorded are no longer with us. See more