Place Names at Native Bound Unbound

Developing a Standard

Place names anchor the histories we recover. Yet across centuries and empires, names have shifted in spelling, meaning, and geography—altered by colonization, translation, and time.
At Native Bound Unbound, we realize that place names are not static labels but reflect records of cultural encounters. Our goal is to make these places understandable to modern readers while preserving the complexity of their historical usage.

The NBU team decided early on to modernize place names in translation to their modern equivalent, realizing that the historical and variant forms will be searchable via the transcriptions. This standardization supports the place section of the site and mapping. To accurately determine place names, including places that no longer exist, the NBU team and researchers use a variety of scholarly references. For example, Robert Julyan’s The Place Names of New Mexico has been quite usefuly in this endeavor. We continue to incorporate a growing collections of regional sources from across North and South America.

Current places that NBU has researched include Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Paraguay, Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, and variious parts of the United States. As the database grows, so does its capacity to map connections across the hemisphere.

Principles of Practice

1. Language of Place Names in the NBU Database
   Places are generally divided into either specfic sites or regions. This has also affected our naming conventions. City and town names, along with historical buildings and the like, are rendered in their modern standardized forms according to language. Thus, even when a town or city may have an English equivalent, have been standardized to the modern form in the relevant langauge. (Sevilla instead of Seville). However, for larger regions—such as provinces, territories, and viceroyalties, these have been translated to English.
2. Respect for Indigenous Toponyms
   Where Indigenous place names appear, they are preserved in their standard form in translation. In the case where a place name was modified by a later name, we can include both forms in the database. 
3. Cross-Referencing and Searchability
   Each standardized name in the database includes fields for latitude and longitude, modern jurisdiction, and historical notes. Users can search by any known variant, ensuring that even obscure or localized names remain discoverable.

Implementation

The process of incoroporating place names follows into the NBU database is an iterative, collaborative model:

1. Extraction and Verification – Researchers identify place names within transcriptions and cross-check them against existing guides and external sources.
2. Normalization – A modern standardized form is selected, with all known historical variants recorded as alternates.
3. Geolocation – Geographic coordinates are added, linking places to contemporary mapping systems.
4. Cross-Language Review – When a place appears in multiple languages or across colonial borders, the team determines the most historically and linguistically accurate representation.
5. Quality Control – Each finalized entry undergoes review to ensure consistency with NBU’s standards and interoperability with the project’s mapping tools and Core Data system.

This process ensures that each place can be situated historically and geographically—within both the seventeenth-century archive and the present-day landscape.

Expanding the Horizon

While the first phase of this work centered on Spanish-language sources from New Mexico and Mexico, the effort now extends across the hemisphere. The growing datasets for Argentina and Canada demonstrate how standardized methodologies can accommodate very different colonial and linguistic contexts. As NBU expands its archival partnerships, future iterations will integrate data from Dutch, Italian, and Indigenous sources, creating a truly hemispheric geographic framework.

A key focus moving forward is the incorporation of Indigenous toponymy—names rooted in living languages that often predate colonial mapping. These will be integrated through collaboration with Indigenous scholars and communities, ensuring that representation respects both linguistic accuracy and cultural sovereignty.

Ethical Commitments

Place-name standardization, like all aspects of NBU’s methodology, is an ethical as well as technical undertaking. Colonial maps often erased or renamed Indigenous geographies, replacing relationships to land with systems of possession and control.
By preserving both the imposed and the original names, NBU makes visible the historical layers of naming—acts of violence, survival, and persistence that shaped the geography of Indigenous slavery.

Every standardized name in the database is thus more than a coordinate: it is a story of encounter, displacement, and memory. Through ongoing research and collaboration, Native Bound Unbound aims to rebuild the geography of this history—accurately, respectfully, and across the languages of the Americas.