The Nautical Archaeology Program (NAP) is a degree-granting program within the Anthropology Department at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
The Nautical Archaeology Program offers admission to students seeking graduate degrees in nautical archaeology. The primary focus is on training archaeologists to become divers, rather than teaching divers the principles of anthropology and archaeology. Students are also required to learn the principles of archaeological conservation, with primary emphasis on the treatment of waterlogged artifacts.
The program has six full-time faculty members and many research associates who conduct surveys, excavations, conservation and reconstruction of ancient, medieval, and early modern shipwrecks. Each professor holds an endowed fellowship. All NAP students are required to take several core courses: History of Wooden Shipbuilding, Research and Reconstruction of Ships, Conservation of Cultural Resources, and Archaeological Methods and Theory. [1] The average time to complete a master's degree is three to five years; for a Ph.D. the average is five to seven years. [2] The program admits between eight and ten students each year. Graduating students are awarded their M.A. or Ph.D. in Anthropology.
The Nautical Archaeology Program began after the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) became affiliated with Texas A&M University in 1976. As part of the affiliation, Texas A&M established the Nautical Archaeology Program as a separate entity. Since the first excavations INA carried out were in the Mediterranean, the main focus was initially on Old World nautical archaeology; after affiliating with the University, a New World archaeologist joined the staff, and work began in North America and Africa. [3] The establishment of a department dedicated to the discipline allowed nautical archaeology to develop into an important subfield of archaeology.
In 2005, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents established the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation (CMAC), a research center intended to be the main mechanism of cooperation between the Nautical Archaeology Program and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. All of the laboratories once part of the Nautical Archaeology Program are now administered by CMAC. CMAC is meant to be the Nautical counterpart of the Center for the Study of the First Americans (CSFA), a highly regarded research institute affiliated with Texas A&M which works closely with the terrestrial archaeologists in the Anthropology department. [4]
The staff of six full-time professors of Nautical Archaeology makes the NAP one of the largest academic programs in nautical archaeology in the world. [5] NAP professors direct most of INA's projects, since the security offered by their permanent positions allows a long-term commitment to excavation and publishing. [6] Each professor holds an endowed fellowship, professorship, or chair [7]
Since the creation of the program, there have been only 11 faculty members: Dr. George Bass, Dr. Frederick van Doornick, Jr., Dr. Fred Hocker, J. Richard Steffy, Dr. Deborah Carlson, Dr. Filipe Vieira de Castro, Dr. Kevin Crisman, Dr. Donny Hamilton, Dr. Cemal Pulak, Dr. C. Wayne Smith, and Dr. Shelley Wachsmann. [8]
Dr. Bass and Dr. van Doornick are now professors emeriti and Dr. Hocker left the program in 1999 after eight years of teaching to take a position with the Center for Maritime Archaeology, part of the National Museum of Denmark in Roskilde. J. Richard Steffy died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder on November 29, 2007. [9]
The Uluburun Shipwreck is a Late Bronze Age shipwreck dated to the late 14th century BC, discovered close to the east shore of Uluburun, Turkey, in the Mediterranean Sea. The shipwreck was discovered in the summer of 1982 by Mehmed Çakir, a local sponge diver from Yalıkavak, a village near Bodrum.
The Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) is an organization devoted to the study of humanity's interaction with the sea through the practice of archaeology.
Roderick Sprague III was an American anthropologist, ethnohistorian and historical archaeologist, and the Emeritus Director of the Laboratory of Anthropology at the University of Idaho in Moscow, where he taught for thirty years. He had extensive experience in environmental impact research, trade beads, aboriginal burial customs, and the Columbia Basin area. Sprague was president of the Society of Bead Researchers from 2004-2007.
UCL's Institute of Archaeology is an academic department of the Social & Historical Sciences Faculty of University College London (UCL) which it joined in 1986 having previously been a school of the University of London. It is currently one of the largest centres for the study of archaeology, cultural heritage and museum studies in the world, with over 100 members of staff and 600 students housed in a 1950s building on the north side of Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury area of Central London.
The Kyrenia Ship is the wreck of a 4th-century BC ancient Greek merchant ship. It was discovered by Greek-Cypriot diving instructor Andreas Cariolou in November 1965 during a storm. Having lost the exact position, Cariolou carried out more than 200 dives until he re-discovered the wreck in 1967 close to Kyrenia (Keryneia) in Cyprus. Michael Katzev, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, directed a scientific excavation from 1967 to 1969. Katzev later became a co-founder of the American Institute of Nautical Archaeology. The find was extensively covered in a documentary by the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation titled "With Captain, Sailors Three: The Ancient Ship of Kyrenia". The ship itself was very well preserved with more than half its hull timbers in good condition. After it was raised from the seabed, it found a new home at the Ancient Shipwreck Museum in Kyrenia Castle, where it remains on exhibit.
John F. Cherry is a British-American prehistorian and archaeologist, specialising in Aegean prehistory and survey archaeology. He is Joukowsky Family Professor in Archaeology and Professor of Classics at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge and the University of Michigan.
George Fletcher Bass was an American archaeologist. An early practitioner of underwater archaeology, he co-directed the first expedition to entirely excavate an ancient shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya in 1960 and founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in 1972.
George Robert Fischer was an American underwater archaeologist, considered the founding father of the field in the National Park Service. A native Californian, he did undergraduate and graduate work at Stanford University, and began his career with the National Park Service in 1959, which included assignments in six parks, the Washington, D.C. Office, and the Southeast Archaeological Center from which he retired in 1988. He began teaching courses in underwater archaeology at Florida State University in 1974 and co-instructed inter-disciplinary courses in scientific diving techniques. After retirement from the NPS his FSU activities were expanded and his assistance helped shape the university's program in underwater archaeology.
Sarah Helen Parcak is an American archaeologist and Egyptologist, who has used satellite imagery to identify potential archaeological sites in Egypt, Rome and elsewhere in the former Roman Empire. She is a professor of Anthropology and director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In partnership with her husband, Greg Mumford, she directs survey and excavation projects in the Faiyum, Sinai, and Egypt's East Delta.
The Kizilburun shipwreck is an ancient Roman shipwreck in the Aegean that was discovered in 1993 by Dr. Cemal Pulak. The wreck itself is located just off the western coast of Turkey, near the island of Chios and the city of Çeçme. The coordinates of the wreck are 38.26075°N 26.24256°E. The ship itself was a Navis Lapidera, or Roman stone carrying ship. The wreck was found at a depth of 45–48 meters or around 150 feet.
The Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation (CMAC) was created in May 2005 by the regents of Texas A&M University.
The School for Advanced Research (SAR), until 2007 known as the School of American Research and founded in 1907 as the School for American Archaeology (SAA), is an advanced research center located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. Since 1967, the scope of the school's activities has embraced a global perspective through programs to encourage advanced scholarship in anthropology and related social science disciplines and the humanities, and to facilitate the work of Native American scholars and artists. SAR offers residential fellowships for artists and scholars, and it publishes academic and popular non-fiction books through SAR Press.
John Richard Steffy was an American nautical archaeologist.
Charles T. Meide Jr., known as Chuck Meide, is an underwater and maritime archaeologist and currently the Director of LAMP, the research arm of the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum located in St. Augustine, Florida. Meide, of Syrian descent on his father's side, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised in the adjacent coastal town of Atlantic Beach. He earned BA and MA degrees in Anthropology with a focus in underwater archaeology in 1993 and 2001 from Florida State University, where he studied under George R. Fischer, and undertook Ph.D. studies in Historical Archaeology at the College of William and Mary starting the following year. Meide has participated in a wide array of shipwreck and maritime archaeological projects across the U.S., especially in Florida, and throughout the Caribbean and Bermuda and in Australia and Ireland. From 1995 to 1997 he participated in the search for, discovery, and total excavation of La Salle's shipwreck, La Belle , lost in 1686. From December 1997 to January 1998 he served as Co-Director of the Kingstown Harbour Shipwreck Project, an investigation sponsored by the Institute of Maritime History and Florida State University into the wreck of the French frigate Junon (1778) lost in 1780 in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In 1999 he directed the Dog Island Shipwreck Survey, a comprehensive maritime survey of the waters around a barrier island off the coast of Franklin County, Florida, and between 2004 and 2006 he directed the Achill Island Maritime Archaeology Project off the coast of County Mayo, Ireland. Since taking over as Director of LAMP in 2006, he has directed the First Coast Maritime Archaeology Project, a state-funded research and educational program focusing on shipwrecks and other maritime archaeological resources in the offshore and inland waters of Northeast Florida. In 2009, during this project, Meide discovered the "Storm Wreck," a ship from the final fleet to evacuate British troops and Loyalist refugees from Charleston at the end of the Revolutionary War, which wrecked trying to enter St. Augustine in late December 1782. He led the archaeological excavation of this shipwreck site each summer from 2010 through 2015, overseeing the recovery of thousands of well-preserved artifacts.
Ralph K. Pedersen is a nautical archaeologist from Levittown New York, United States. He was the DAAD Gastdozent für Nautische Archäologie at Philipps-Universität Marburg 2010–2013, and has been 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 teaching online courses in archaeology in the History Department at Southwestern Assemblies of God University since 2009.
The Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World (AAMW) is an interdisciplinary program for research and teaching of archaeology, particularly archaeology and art of the ancient Mediterranean, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Near East, based in the Penn Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Middle American Research Institute was established at Tulane University in 1924.
Miriam T. Stark is an American archaeologist whose field experience and emphasis of studies have included locations in North America, the Near East and Southeast Asia. She is currently a professor of Southeast Asian Archaeology at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, a position she has held since August 1995. Having first received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, she went on to complete her M.A and PhD from the University of Arizona. Stark has co-directed the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project (LOMAP), located in southern Cambodia for the past 12 years. Her research focus not only includes the various aspects of political economy, but also on the process of state formation.
Margaret E. "Peggy" Leshikar-Denton is an archaeologist specialising in underwater archaeology, and director of the Cayman Islands National Museum.
The Serçe Limani Shipwreck or Glass Shipwreck is a shipwreck discovered in the Serçe Limani bay, southwest coast of Turkey, opposing Rhodos, in the Mediterranean Sea. The shipwreck was discovered by Donald Frey during an individual dive.
