THIS part links two major themes in the handbook, specifically, it provides a bridge between the archaeological study of past hunter-gatherers through their surviving material remains (Parts ll V), and the increasingly professionalized anthropological study of contemporary foragers through direct observation, historical research and ethnographic lieldwork Until a few centuries ago, there were at least some hunting and gathering populations still living in most world regions. Many of these foragers, for example, in Africa and acros Eurasia, had already been in culture contact for centuries, if not millennia; other groups such as Australia's Aborigines and many Arctic peoples living in North America, inter acted only with other hunter-gatherers, and had yet to experience more direct encoun ters with farmers, pastoralists, urban centres, and empires However, by 1500 AD all these hunter s stood on the brink of a major new era of global transformation and had yet to experience the full onslaught of European colonial expansion causing culturaF This historical process played out following centuries, major on dislocations and often painful local adjustments for many indigenous peoples. ltupacts local hunter gatherer societies ranged from demographic collapses due to the introducti of new diseases, increasing government monitoring and control, forced reseulement and acculturation, through to full scale persecution, and in several cases, to wholesale cultural annihilation