Islands and lakes smaller than 2 miles in diameter are not included; those between 2 mi. and 2.67 mi. are included on an arbitrary basis, depending on whether or not I felt the map needed it. A zoomed-in map could include much more detail.
I wonder how long it takes locals to grasp the complexity of the islands, as obviously there are hundreds not included above that are yet a quarter mile in diameter. In any case, the coast looks less complex above than it did tracing the lines from GoogleEarth.
Pejepscot was an incredibly lucky find. Making the map for Sterling, I'm against a wall in finding native names for places, because for one thing I have zero personal relationship with the area and for another, the internet is notoriously devoid of natives carefully recording their own history for other natives. I'm rather stunned that I can't just locate an extensive wiki for every native tribe everywhere in the world ... but of all the things that people think are important, this doesn't seem high on the roster. A wiki would be incredible for this kind of work. Every native family and place of origin could be carefully tabulated and managed by hundreds of focused, careful Abenaki natives ... but instead what we have are some scrubby generalised texts that list Abenaki bands or random Abenaki words with no context whatsoever. It's staggeringly unhelpful. And yet there's more information about Abenakis than there is about Odawa, that I searched for earlier this week.
Real headshaking stuff. So everytime I have to "come up" with an Abenaki name for a place, it's pick a random word and use it. Yesterday, Sterling corrected my use of "Damiriscotta" for the place just east of Brunswick. Well, I'll admit it. That was a totally random word found in on Abenaki webpage that I used because it was at least Abenaki in origin. Most of the time, this is the best I can do here. So if someone would like to correct some name I'm picking for these parts of the world, please do.
London tomorrow.
Thanks very much for this, Alexis. I admire your discipline building these maps out and not going down all of the thousands of historical rabbit holes exposed in the process! As you said on your previous post, "all places have an interesting history."
ReplyDeleteHi, I live across the river from Brunswick, in Topsham, ME, formerly called Pejepscot (which means 'extended long rapids' in Abnaki. If you do more of New England, see if you can get hold of a book called "Indian Place Names Of New England" by John C. Huden. published by Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation in 1962. The book notes that Damariscotta, where my wife grew up, means "plenty of alewives". the alewives still run every year being an anadromous species of herring. Anyway, happy mapping. - Chris D.
ReplyDeleteChris, as you can see, I added Pejepscot as the village upstream from Brunswick (where I guessed, probably incorrectly, was the location of those rapids. Wikipedia says "the area" was called Pejepscot, but doesn't say the town was called that, so that's the source of my error. The book sounds interesting. Thank you for wading in.
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