Perhaps as long ago as 23,000 years human footprints were pressed into the mud along the shore of prehistoric Lake Otero now called Alkali Flat just west of the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. It's believed the hunters who made that trackway carried spears tipped with the large fluted stone points of the so-called Clovis culture.
A Clovis site in Alaska dated to about 12,400 years ago has led most archaeologists to believe the culture arose only after their arrival to North America. Exploiting the gap between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets during the Wisconsin Glacial Episode those Clovis People were the first humans to see the Missouri Buttes and Mahto Tipila in Wyoming. The Clovis culture thrived on the high plains and in the Black Hills before settling the rest of the Mississippi basin but those pioneers had already explored parts of Montana long before they found Clovis, New Mexico where their stone tools were unearthed in the 1920s.
Before US 14 was widened a team led by Adrien Hannus from Augustana University uncovered evidence of human habitation from over 12,000 years ago in a cave in Boulder Canyon near Sturgis, South Dakota. At one excavation site in Wyoming evidence revealed that humans killed a mammoth with a Clovis pointed spear launched from an atlatl, a type of throwing stick. Nearby Inyan Kara Peak in the Wyoming Black Hills is the bastardization of Amerindian words where chert was quarried for atlatl points.
The relatively small distance along the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana and the Front Range between the Pecos River in New Mexico and the Missouri at Fort Peck reminds me again how the earliest humans in North America who were thwarted by glaciers, the dire wolf, and Smilodon on everything north of the Sangre de Cristos terminating at Santa Fe blazed the Pecos Trail from west to east into the southern Great Plains and Mississippi Valley to find an inland paradise teeming with prey.
Athabaskan is the root language of many Pacific coastal people also of the Diné or Navajo and of the Apache.
I believe the ancestors of the Chacoans came up the Columbia and the Snake Rivers then into ancient Lake Bonneville in Utah and down the western slope of the Rocky Mountains into the Four Corners Region. At the southern terminus of the Rockies near Santa Fe interaction with the Clovis culture seems perfectly likely. Numic is an Ito-Aztecan language and the linguistic base for most western slope tribes including Mono, Comanche and even Shoshone.
In Southern California the success of pre-Clovis humans caused a mass extinction event.
Indigenous history in the Valles caldera goes back at least 8,000 years and obsidian quarried there for knives and projectile points is found throughout the region. The ancestors of Jemez Pueblo or Walatowa migrated into the area in the late 13th Century after Mesa Verde was laid bare. Some linguists have grouped local Keres speakers with Siouan and Iroquoisian dialects.
Santa Fe Indian Market 2023 is featuring an Alaska Native exhibition happening now.
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