The International Symposium on Language and Culture Documentation (Buenos Aires, August 14–15, 2008) that gave rise to this volume was organized by the Documentation and Research Laboratory for Linguistics and Anthropology (DILA), a center created in 2007 by an agreement between the Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. DILA hosts a Regional Digital Archive for language resources (see http://www. caicyt. gov. ar/DILA). The event was collaboratively funded by the Volkswagen Foundation through its DoBeS Program; the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), Germany; and CONICET, Argentina. Special support for the publication of this volume was provided by the Department of Linguistics, MPI-EVA and CONICET, the latter through both DILA and CONICET research project PIP 100806/2011–14 led by Lucía Golluscio. We are grateful to all the institutions that were involved in this project. We would also like to thank the contributors to the volume and other participants in the Symposium for their deep commitment to the corresponding activities with the indigenous communities and general audience and for the fruitful discussion during the event. In particular, we thank the contributors for their cooperation in the complex task of preparing a consistent collective volume. We are especially grateful to Nick Evans and Tony Woodbury who contributed to the volume although they could not attend the Symposium. We also benefited greatly from other colleagues’ comments on topics here developed: Sven Grawunder (MPI-EVA) and Willem de Reuse (University of North Texas). Our gratitude goes also to Hans-Jörg Bibiko for his unstinting help with the preparation of the maps for this volume. We further thank the DILA staff members for the organization of the 2008 Symposium and additional activities, as well as for their support for this volume. For their invaluable assistance in editing and typesetting this volume, as well as checking the Spanish, we are grateful to Gabriel Castro Alanis, Santiago Durante, Felipe Hasler Sandoval, Cecilia Hokama, Mayra Juanatey, Paola Pacor, Ivanna Ramírez Chain and Mariana Rodríguez. Special thanks go out to Cecilia Magadán and Martín Califa, who were in charge of the Spanish translations and revisions of Evans’ and Woodbury’s papers. We would also like to thank Cambridge University Press for their permission to publish the Spanish translation of Woodbury’s paper.