In 1540, when the train of soldiers in the company of Coronado’s Spanish Expedition entered the unknown lands later called New Mexico, four groups of native Americans were established residents in the area. Along the arable valley of the Rio Grande and its tributaries, and in several outlying areas were the adobe and stone apartment-house villages of the Pueblo Indians, whose livelihood was based largely on agriculture. East of the mountains were scattered bands of Plains Indians, Eastern Apaches, who were nomadic hunters following the herds of buffalo that ranged across the vast grasslands of the High Plains. Western Apaches were dispersed in small bands of hunters and gatherers of wild foods through the mountainous country to the west of the Rio Grande. A related group, the Navajo, augmented the necessities of life gained by hunting and gathering with subordinate agricultural crops in the Plateau region to the northwest. Early contacts of the _conquistadores_ were largely with the Pueblo Indians, although they had limited knowledge of the Apaches and Navajos in outlying districts. There was little to suggest to the Spanish invaders, except for the ruins of long-abandoned Pueblo villages, that the fragmentary record of thousands of years of human prehistory lay scattered in the dust beneath their feet. Undoubtedly they would have dismissed as utter nonsense any notion that men armed with stone-tipped spears had here slain elephants in a marsh 12,000 years old that now lay buried beneath shifting sands of a desert landscape. Indeed, it was not until the last quarter of the 1800’s that serious attempts were made to decipher the prehistoric traces of the Pueblo Indians, whereas concrete evidence that man had hunted long-extinct Pleistocene big game in America was not discovered until less than forty years ago. EARLY HUNTERS