What seems increasingly clear from this body of work is that the first Americans — whoever they were, however many founding populations contributed to the eventual diversity of the hemisphere’s people, however they navigated the routes that brought them to a new continent — were here considerably earlier than twentieth-century archaeology assumed.

The Clovis horizon marks not the arrival of people in the Americas but a specific technological and cultural florescence whose relationship to what came before is still being worked out.

People were here before Clovis, and White Sands proves they were here much earlier than anyone had previously demonstrated with such direct, physical, unambiguous evidence.

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have maintained, in their oral traditions and their relationships to the land, a sense of presence that is far older than anything Western archaeology initially credited.

The Pueblo peoples of New Mexico live in a landscape they have occupied, in recognizable cultural form, for at least a thousand years, and their own histories extend the occupation considerably further.

When they speak of their relationship to the land of the Southwest as ancient and fundamental, they are not using metaphor.