The subsequent collaboration between Bustos and a research team that included ichnologists, geochronologists, and paleoecologists brought the tools needed to evaluate what had been found.

The methodological innovation required to address the White Sands site was not, in most cases, the development of entirely new techniques.

Rather, it was the application of existing techniques — luminescence dating, three-dimensional photogrammetry, isotopic analysis of sediment organic matter — to a site type and a time period where those techniques had not previously been systematically applied.

The methods existed.

The site needed researchers willing to bring them to bear on a question that the standard frameworks had not anticipated needed answering.

This pattern — of evidence existing in the landscape, waiting for a researcher with the right combination of tools, knowledge, and framework to recognize and pursue it — is common in the history of archaeological discovery.