Dr. Robert Dello-Russo is the retired Director of the Office of Contract Archeology at the University of New Mexico. Prior to that, he was the Deputy Director at the NM Office of Archaeological Studies and the Compliance Archaeologist for the NM Department of Game & Fish—both in Santa Fe—and the owner and principal of Escondida Research Group, a private archaeological consulting firm. He has almost 40 years of archaeological experience, including field work in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Intermountain West, and the Southwest, where he served as Principal Investigator for dozens of grants funded and large scale CRM projects (including at White Sands National Park). In addition, he was the Principal Investigator for 20 years at the Water Canyon Paleoindian site in west-central New Mexico. His fields of research include hunter-gatherer prehistory in western North America, paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental studies, geomorphological processes, and the XRF sourcing of silicified rhyolites and dacites. Dr. Dello-Russo has a PhD in Anthropology/Archaeology from the University of New Mexico.