Ralph K. Pedersen

Ralph K. Pedersen is the founder and president of The Red Sea Institute for Anthropological Research.

Dr. Pedersen is an archaeologist specializing in the seafaring of the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Gulf, and Indian Ocean.  

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. 

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 began the excavation and study of a submerged site in Beirut.

He has been a Research Associate with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology since 1992. 

Dr. Pedersen has been the recipient of numerous grants for research and teaching, and his research has been published in leading journals.