Dr. Matt Schmader has been conducting research on the archaeology of central New Mexico for 42 years, studying sites of every major cultural time period from PaleoIndian and Archaic to the Early Ancestral Pueblo, later ancestral Rio Grande Pueblos and petroglyphs, and historic Albuquerque. He is retired superintendent of the City's Open Space Division and former Albuquerque City Archaeologist. He is a UNM Anthropology alum (1994 PhD) and is presently adjunct associate professor of archaeology at the Department of Anthropology. 

His current research is on the Contact period, focusing on the first tumultuous encounters between local Pueblo people and the huge Vázquez de Coronado expedition of 1540-1542. His talk will include results from recently completed work under a grant from the American Battlefield Protection Program.