“Toponimia vasca en la documentación conservada en San Millán de la Cogolla: dos estratos diferenciables”, en Actas del II Congreso de la Cátedra L. Michelena, Universidad del País Vasco, 115-125 (2009)

In this paper we argue that the Basque place names that appear south of the river Ebro in the Rioja and Burgos regions should be separated into two groups, with different distributions, chronologies and forms, whereas previously they have always been analised as a whole. The first group is limited to the mountainous areas around the headwaters of the Oja, Tirón and Arlanzón rivers, and consists mainly of references to grazing areas and water courses, with relatively few settlement names. These names appear during the 9 th and 10 th centuries just to the west of the Castille-Navarre frontier. The second group appears towards the end of the 11 th century in the agriculturally fertile lower reaches of the Oja and Tirón rivers, just to the east of the same border and consists mainly of settlement names bearing the Basque suffix-uri. In both cases political circumstances provide a context in which inmigration to the areas in question from Álava makes sense a couple of generations before these names start to figure in our source material: the diplomas of the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla.