New Mexico before Columbus, prior to the European Age of Discovery, is a long and fascinating human story which was often overlooked or condensed in our history books in favor of the Colonial explorations, settlements, and stories. Now we have the advantage of more than a half-century of state-sponsored archaeological investigations and more than a century of anthropological fascination with New Mexico and the Southwest. We are living in one of the most studied cultural area in North America north of Mexico and with well more than one hundred thousand identified historical sites cataloged from the long span of human time here. This presentation will look at the time before Columbus and include paleo-Indian, archaic, and classic ancestral cultures whose presence is now much clearer and better understood.