Lower Tanana Place Name maps debuted

Kari presenting one of the new maps

Last Friday James Kari and Robert Charlie (in absentia) presented a talk at the UAF Anthropology Colloquium entitled Lower Tanana Athabascan Place Names: The Structure and Function of Shared Geographic Knowledge. The talk featured preliminary results from a Lower Tanana mapping project which undertook the consolidation of indigenous place name data from across the Lower Tanana region.

Several mapping projects have been conducted in the region previously. One of the most well-known projects resulted in the volume Native place names of Minto Flats and vicinity, Central Alaska compiled by Elizabeth Andrews, Chad Thompson, and Peter John (1980, Tanana Chiefs Conference and Minto Village Council). That project compiled 255 names. The present project attempts a more comprehensive catalog, resulting in more than 1064 names. The names were compiled in a GIS database which will be made publicly available through the Alaska Native Place Names Project. In addition, three large-scale maps covering the north (1:300,000 scale), south (1:300,000), and Minto Flats (1:125,000) regions will be made available as PDF files.

The project was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation Alaska EPSCoR Program.

Detail of the The'odi area, from printed map

Kari indicating the suite of names based on The'odi