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 annihilationin focusing on understanding how these regional hunter researh tiaditions emerged and diversified, gatherer do not necessarily map in a clear or it is also important to understand that these into African predictable way onto national research traditions. Research hunter gatherers, for example has been highly i from the outset In contrast, work within other national boundaries has been more isolated. and indeed idiosyncratic Russian Soviet work on its northern indigenous peoples is an obvious example, but there are others (see Barnard 20o In this way modern geopolitics lias also played a implicit role in structuring the history of hunter gatherer research, with large ureas like Siberia initially excuded from dehates in the Man hunter era in the 1960s, and then partially rehabilitated alter opening upof new academic contacts towards the end of the Cold War (Murdoch 68 Schweitzer zooo The contingent intersections between these regional and national research trajecturies also generate highly complex landscapes ol scholarship and debate that ch be daunting for both new and established researcher