The antiquity of Indigenous presence in the Americas is not, from the perspective of Indigenous communities, a scientific question awaiting resolution.

It is a known fact, preserved in oral traditions and ceremonies and ecological knowledge and the very physical landscape of a landscape that has been known and named and loved for as long as anyone can remember.

The footprints at White Sands did not reveal a human presence that was unknown to Indigenous peoples of the Southwest.

They revealed it to a scientific and public audience that had been operating with an incomplete model of that presence.

That distinction matters for how we tell this story.

The Archaeology That The Ice Swallowed