But the geographic and ecological continuity is real.

The Tularosa Basin and its surrounding mountains have been inhabited by successive human populations for as long as the climate has permitted human life there — which is to say, for at least 23,000 years as now demonstrated, and possibly longer as additional evidence may eventually show.

The modern Indigenous peoples of New Mexico and the broader Southwest are the inheritors of this long human history.

Their presence in the landscape is not an addition to it or a recent claim on it.

It is the continuation of the longest continuous human occupation of any landscape in the Western Hemisphere for which we have solid evidence.

White Sands, in its most complete reading, is not a story about ancient people who lived in a lost world that has no connection to the present.