Hunters in Transition: An Outline of Early Sámi History, by Lars Ivar Hansen and Bjørnar Olsen, is a major English-language study of the history of the Sámi peoples of Fennoscandia. The study partly translates and partly expands and updates the authors' 2004 Samenes historie fram til 1750. Summary After an introductory chapter sketching the scope and historiographical and political import of the book, Chapter 2 explores the historiography of historical research on the Sámi, emphasising the ways in which Sámi history and archaeology were systematically marginalised in favour of national histories of the Nordic countries which emphasised their ethnic majorities and the formation of states. The chapter surveys different strategies which scholars used to marginalise Sámi people from national narratives at different times -- positioning them as nomadic primitives; as unchanging subjects of ethnography rather than agents in the changes over time that constitute history; or as Eastern migrants to northern Fennoscandia of no greater antiquity than the North-Germanic and Finnish-speakers on whom national histories focused. It then focuses on the 1980s work of Knut Odner, promoting perspectives on Sámi ethnogenesis inspired by the reconceputalisations of ethnicity in the 1970s by Fredrik Barth and of cultural change by Pierre Bourdieu. Hansen and Olsen argue that researchers should ask not 'when did the Sámi arrive?' but 'why did Sámi identity arise?' They favour an interpretation in which northern Scandinavia was populated from similar sources as the rest of northern Europe following the last glacial maximum, and that, without dramatic migrations, accelerating contact with other peoples led this population to adopt the Uralic language that became Sámi, and to develop a consolidated ethnic identity in contradistinction to neighbouring peoples on the North Atlantic and Baltic coasts, and in Russia. 'Our position is that it may be meaningful to speak of Sámi ethnicity, at least as a retrospective category, from the end of the last millennium BC. Only then do we have documentation of hunting communities in interior, northern, and eastern Fennoscandia being involved in more extensive external interaction that may have caused the crucial "us-them" awareness', they argue (p. 31). The chapter also includes an excursus on the linguistic history of names for the Sámi. Chapter 3, 'Economic Specialization and Ethnic Consolidation: Northern Hunting Societies in the Iron Age and Early Middle Ages' makes case-studies of a range of archaeologically attested phenomena, alongside the famous Old English account of Ohthere's description of