The relationship between landscape and place names is very strong. In ancient times, places were named after natural resources and the landscape’s hydro-geo-morphological features. This trend persists today in some contexts. For instance, Abui place names on Alor Island are named after important landscape features, agricultural and horticultural crops, and useful plants. Abui toponyms are compounded with lexemes describing human settlements and highlighting the close relationship between nature and man. This chapters shows how the analysis of the landscape and related disciplines, like landscape archaeology (the study of the past use of the landscape determined by archaeological findings), enable scholars to reconstruct the remote origins of toponyms both in Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. While landscape is often considered in association with the physical features of a territory, the authors call for a holistic view of the landscape itself, which blends physical, social, cultural, environmental, and religious dimensions. To this end, toponyms are useful tools providing the researchers with insights into how people use or used the landscape.

This chapter explores the notion of diachronic toponymy, which is the discipline that deals with the reconstruction of a place name in the context of undocumented languages/language families and in the absence of historical records. In many communities that do not have a writing system, oral stories and traditions become important sources of toponymic data, as place names are passed down orally, from one generation to another. Additionally, oral stories also commemorate the land and its namers, and are an ‘oral record’ of the physical territory and the changes made to it by human inhabitation. The chapter presents a step-by-step guide for studying place names according to a diachronic toponymy approach – one that also incorporates methods from anthropological linguistics, language documentation, and field linguistics. This is applied to a toponymic system in the Abui community on Alor Island, southeast Indonesia. The authors also demonstrate how historical semantics can complement the toponymic analysis by applying its criteria to a toponymic system which includes several Abui toponyms that show a semantic specialisation of the Abui term for ‘village’.