The people who walked the shores of Lake Otero during the Last Glacial Maximum were not the last people to use that landscape.

As the climate warmed at the end of the Ice Age and the lake contracted over millennia, later populations continued to inhabit the Tularosa Basin and the surrounding region.

The archaeological record of the Southwest from the post-glacial period through the historical era documents continuous and complex human occupation — changing cultures, changing technologies, changing settlement patterns, but persistent human presence in a landscape that has always demanded adaptation and rewarded intimate knowledge.

The Archaic cultures that occupied the Southwest following the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions developed increasingly sophisticated relationships with the landscape’s plant and animal resources, eventually contributing to the development of the agricultural societies whose ruins are among the most impressive in North America.

The Ancestral Puebloans — whose descendants include the modern Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona — built substantial stone architecture across the Colorado Plateau and the Rio Grande valley, leaving behind sites like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde that are among the most studied archaeological complexes on the continent.

The connection between the White Sands people and these later cultures is not directly traceable from the current evidence.