In Those Who Walked Before: How Ice Age Footprints in New Mexico Retell the Stories of the First Americans, authors Matthew Bennett, David Bustos, and Daniel Odess bring to light a story told from the footprints of early humans and extinct mammalian species that wandered through the Pleistocene wetlands more than 20,000 years ago in the area we know today as New Mexico. To set the story in time and place, they briefly discuss the history of the Clovis First Hypothesis for initial migrations to the Americas and the century-long denial of earlier-than-Clovis sites.
The authors share a personal narrative of the discovery of the footprint trackways and their fieldwork, along with rigorous geochronological and paleoecological testing and reporting from a multiyear, multidisciplinary investigation. They go to great lengths to create an accessible but also academic manuscript. Although the site has not produced any lithic tools, the authors clearly support their findings based on iconology and the study of fossilized trackways, which have provided data as robust as any archaeological artifact assemblage. They dedicate substantial space to explaining the radiocarbon dating of Ruppia cirrhosa (ditch grass) seeds and optically stimulated luminescence testing, which dated the trackways to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago.
The presence of early humans in the Tularosa Basin, New Mexico, at the beginning of the last glacial maximum firmly supports an earlier-than-Clovis date for humans in the area we know today as the Americas. Although not the first site to place humans in the Americas during the Pleistocene, the documentation and dating of the White Sands site strongly support an understanding of early humans in a continental area where archaeologists previously denied their presence before 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.
In addition to reporting raw data, the authors re-create an Ice Age landscape where humans coexisted and interacted with megafauna. The text presents a picture of human footprint trackways embedded in the massive tracks of ground sloths. The human footprints were analyzed by stride length and size and deemed to be those of teenagers or young children.
Although the authors’ thorough investigations, testing, and dating show that humans were present in this area 23,000 years ago, the book does not consider possible migration routes before or during the last glacial maximum. Examples of previously held assumptions regarding Pleistocene landscapes that were overturned during this research are found on page 8, where the authors discuss finding tracks in the middle of a lakebed, where they thought they could not have survived.
The authors make it clear that they are aware of the history of severe peer critique of earlier-than-Clovis archaeological sites in the Americas, and they tread softly—and perhaps far too softly—in their discussions of this history and the denial of earlier human sites in American archaeology. They discuss what they call a conundrum regarding a lack of discussion around precursors to Clovis technologies. They state, “Indigenous archaeologist Paulette Steeves called out this narrative as an unconscious repression of the Indigenous voice” (p. 129). However, I have never characterized the lack of Indigenous voices in archaeological discussions as “unconscious.” Clearly, in American archaeology, histories of colonization and bias in American archaeology have silenced Indigenous voices regarding their own histories. The authors did include members of Native American communities in the fieldwork and briefly in the text. However, the book would have benefited from including these communities’ voices in a full chapter and, if they wished to share them, their oral traditions regarding their ancestors in these areas.
The authors discuss a few of the earlier-than-Clovis sites in the area we know today as the Americas (p. 132). However, this section could have been expanded to include brief references to the hundreds of other archaeological sites in North and South America that have been published and date to earlier-than-Clovis technologies.
Those Who Walked Before is a strong addition to the emerging story of early humans in the area we know today as the Americas. The authors walk readers through the challenges and excitement of fieldwork and the harsh reality of peer review and critique. Further testing and dating of site materials have shown the fierce determination of these authors and scientists to ensure that the White Sands footprints site is firmly embedded in the early human history of the area we know today as North America.
