Laudator Temporis Acti

Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005), Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 112-113:

Nothing's older, in many places, than the toponyms themselves. Not even the archaic sites they still, occasionally, designate: the ruins, the earthworks, the beheaded remainders, say, of some oppidum lying perched on its long since abandoned outcrop. Nomen, quite frequently, antedates habitatio, for a particular place was often named—attributed—prior to being settled. Thus the toponym constitutes an artifact of its own, a "document," as the scholars would put it. Nothing, in turn, receives more focused attention, not even the potsherds, the stray coin, the scrupulously analyzed cross sections of the carpolithes (the fossilized fruit of the site's earliest inhabitants). As the founding vocable, the toponym is treated with all the care of an immensely delicate, perfectly irreplaceable object.

An object? Can a word, a locution, a breath-shred be endowed with all the properties—the material attributes—of an object? Containing everything that might be found, eventually, within its sonorous outlines, can it be considered, indeed, as the object of objects, the "thing" preeminent?

Like the archeologist, the toponymist goes under. Searches, in the present-day place name, for some archaic particle, some linguistic vestige that has somehow managed to survive its lost origins.