Linguistic fieldwork has as many histories as there are countries in which it has been carried out. And there is no global history of fieldwork (and virtually no local histories either). Nor is this the place to write one. This appendix focuses on the history of field research in Brazil and the USA, as examples of the kinds of issues, problems, and solutions faced by both individual field researchers and the general enterprise of field linguistics.

Arguably, field linguistics in the Americas, as field linguistics most places, began as an extension of colonial activity – specifically, missionary work. Let us first consider the case of Brazil, then move on to consider the USA.