New Mexico’s Pivotal Role in Understanding America’s Ice Age Peoples

This event will also be livestreamed on . No registration required for the livestream.

For more than a century, archaeological evidence from New Mexico has played a pivotal role in changing our understanding of how long people have lived on this continent. Folsom, Clovis, and now White Sands mark three important moments in that evolving history.

In 1927, near Folsom, New Mexico, a distinctive projectile point found among the ribs of an extinct bison provided compelling evidence that people had lived alongside Ice Age animals. Just a few years later, evidence from Clovis pushed the accepted timeline further back, with a different style of projectile point found with mammoth remains and beneath layers containing Folsom artifacts. For decades, these two New Mexico sites set the foundation for what was believed to be a record of the earliest people in North America.

Today, the Pleistocene fossil human footprints at White Sands are transforming the conversation again. Dating to roughly 22,000 years ago, they place people in New Mexico thousands of years before Clovis and add another chapter to a human history that extends far deeper into the past than archaeologists once understood.

Archaeologists Vance Holliday and David Meltzer trace the path from Folsom and Clovis to White Sands and discuss how each site has contributed to an understanding that continues to evolve. Together, these places offer a remarkable window into both the deep human history of the Americas and the process through which our understanding of that history changes over time.

Vance Holliday received a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin (1972), an M.A. in Museum Science (with a minor in Soil Science) at Texas Tech University (1977), and a PhD in Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1982). He was on the Geography faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1986-2002) followed by faculty positions in both Anthropology and Geosciences at the University of Arizona (2002–2022) where he is now Professor Emeritus. After training in archaeology and the Earth sciences, his research career began on the Great Plains of the U.S., focused on reconstructing and interpreting the landscapes and environments in which the earliest "Paleoindian" occupants of North America lived, and how those conditions evolved. Since arriving at the UA, he became Director of the Argonaut Archaeological Research Fund, which is devoted to research on the archaeology, geoarchaeology and paleoenvironments of the Paleoindian period in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. In addition, he was part of an international project focused on the Upper Paleolithic archaeology and paleoenvironments of southwestern Russia and central Ukraine.

David J. Meltzer is the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University, and an Affiliate Professor at the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research centers on the origins, antiquity, adaptations, and environments of the first Americans who colonized North America at the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age). He has explored those issues through archaeological field work, principally on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains, and in collaboration with geneticists in using ancient DNA to investigate Native American population history. He is the author of over 200 articles and books, the latter including Folsom: New Archaeological Investigations of a Classic Paleoindian Bison K*ll (2006), and First Peoples in a New World: Populating Ice Age America (2021). His historical study of how knowledge about human antiquity in the Americas was forged is the subject of his book The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America's Ice Age Past (2015). Meltzer is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is the winner of the Society for American Archaeology’s 2025 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research.