Ralph K. Pedersen

Ralph K. Pedersen is the founder and president of The Red Sea Institute for Anthropological Research. He holds a master's degree and a doctorate in nautical archaeology from Texas A&M University and is a registered professional archaeologist (RPA).

Dr. Pedersen is an archaeologist specializing in the seafaring of the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Gulf, and Indian Ocean.  He has conducted field research, surveys, and excavations in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Lebanon, India, Spain, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. He has been a Research Associate with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology since 1992.

He has served as the DAAD Visiting Professor for Nautical Archaeology at Philipps-Universität Marburg; as Distinguished Visiting Professor in Anthropology and Knapp Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of San Diego; and the Whittlesey Chair Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut. He has been adjunct faculty at Southwestern A/G University since 2008 teaching online courses in archaeology, methodology, and ancient civilizations.

Dr. Pedersen has been a member of the excavation of the Bronze Age shipwreck at Uluburun, Turkey; served as daily field director for the 1991 excavation of a 17th- century wreck at Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic under USD Anthropology Associate Professor Jerome Lynn Hall; surveyed underwater in Bahrain; excavated a 1500-year-old shipwreck at Black Assarca Island, Eritrea; surveyed shipwrecks off New York's Long Island, and served as an Associate Director of India's Kadakkarapally Boat Project, which involves a thousand-year-old ship found under a coconut grove. He has conducted an underwater survey at Tell el-Burak in Lebanon, and in the waters off the early Bronze Age tell at Fadous-Kfarabida for the American University of Beirut. In 2013 he and Lucy Semaan conducted the excavation and study of a submerged site in Beirut. Dr. Pedersen has also worked on remote surveying projects in New York and Massachusetts for submerged transmission and natural gas lines.

Dr. Pedersen has been the recipient of numerous grants for research and teaching, and his research has been published in leading journals, which can be found on Academia.edu and
Researchgate.net.

For more information and a listing of his courses see LinkedIn: Ralph K. Pedersen, PhD, RPA
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