In early January 2026, scholars, practitioners, and Indigenous knowledge holders gathered in the Atacama Desert at the V Escuela de Verano in San Pedro de Atacama for an unforgettable encounter of cross-cultural knowledge systems. Among the presenters was Dr. Elvira Serrano, who, alongside her colleague, shared two decades of collaborative work with Quechua and Aymara community members in the highlands of Bolivia - a journey that radically reshapes how we think about place names and landscape.
Their talk, titled “Toponymical maps – documenting ancestral knowledge in the Bolivian Andes,” did more than describe map-making: it brought to life a worldview where landscapes speak, and human naming is not a one-way act of designation but a form of dialogue with place. In Indigenous Andean cosmologies, a mountain is not an inert object on a grid; it is an active being with agency, memory, and presence. Lakes have emotions, fields walk, and places reveal their own names to those who listen. This deeply relational perspective situates place names not as labels but as living cultural and ecological relationships rooted in centuries of observation, ritual, and reciprocal care.
Toponymy That Matters: Culture, Rights, and Governance
Documenting and mapping these place names is far more than a linguistic exercise. It is tightly linked to contemporary struggles for environmental governance, land and water rights, and cultural survival. By recording Indigenous toponyms together with their meanings and stories, Serrano and collaborators create tools that affirm community histories and territorial claims, support ecological understanding, and strengthen collective identity. In the Andes, toponyms encapsulate ecosystem knowledge - embodying ecological functions, seasonal rhythms, and historical events that scientific maps often overlook. Such Indigenous place names have been shown to reflect integrated human–environment relationships that differ sharply from Western cartographic traditions, in which nature and culture are often separated.
This approach echoes earlier scholarly work demonstrating how Andean place names integrate linguistic, cultural, and ecological information, not just spatial coordinates. In Bolivia, research has shown that Indigenous place names - created through communal interaction with the landscape - encode environmental knowledge, geodiversity, and social history, which can serve both academic understanding and community-based land management strategies.
Ethics and Participation: Who Owns the Map?
Central to this work is a commitment to ethical research practice. Mapping Indigenous place names must not reproduce colonial patterns of extraction or academic appropriation. Rather than simply collecting place names for external use, Serrano and her collaborators engage communities in long-term dialogues about who retains access to the data, how it is stored, and how it is returned to the people whose knowledge it embodies. The aim is not external publication alone, but community empowerment - supporting decisions about their own territories according to locally defined priorities.
This ethical stance aligns with broader discussions in Indigenous geography and critical toponymy, which emphasize community control over spatial narratives and resist the imposition of external categories on Indigenous landscapes.
Beyond the Map: Landscape as kin, not object
In the Andean Indigenous worldview shared at the event, places are at once culture and nature - defying the very division that underpins most Western academic disciplines. Mountains protect, lakes communicate, fields change and move - in an ongoing exchange with human actors who are themselves shaped by ritual, memory, and reciprocal responsibility.
The concept that “places reveal their names to people” disrupts the assumption that humans impose meaning on a silent landscape. Instead it positions place names as dialogues emerging from lived experience and reciprocal presence. This resonates with in-depth ethnographic perspectives that treat Indigenous toponyms as ecosystem concepts, highlighting how naming reflects ecological integration and a personalized sense of place.
Looking Forward: INDAGAR and the Future of Applied Toponymy
This work is part of a broader research initiative - the Indigenous Agroecological Territories (INDAGAR) project — which seeks to link Indigenous territorial knowledge with agroecological governance and sustainability. Although much of this project’s focus centers on food systems and environmental resilience, its inclusion of Indigenous place names highlights the central role of spatial knowledge in community-led ecological stewardship.
As the field of toponymy evolves, contributions like those presented in the desert of Atacama remind us that place names are not static keys to a past world, but living inscriptions of heritage, identity, and ecological practice. When places speak, they tell histories that official maps have long ignored — and in doing so, they empower the people whose ancestral ties to land continue to shape cultural and environmental futures.
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