INA Projects in Africa
The Aksumite-Period Shipwreck at Black Assarca Island
Dashur Boats Survey, Egypt
Khufu (Cheops) Boat Documentation Project
Sadana Island, Egypt
Santo Antonio da Tanna (Mombasa Wreck)
INA's early work in Egypt, where for more than a decade until 2003 Douglas Haldane and Cheryl Ward directed a branch of INA, has included projects from the documentation and analysis of wooden riverine craft buried with the pharaohs to the study of the reliefs of Pharaoh Ramses III's battle against the "Sea Peoples" on the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. From 1995 to 1998 INA-Egypt excavated a trading vessel that sank around 1765 near Sadana Island in the Red Sea. More recently INA research associates have worked on two exciting initiatives - a search with ground penetrating radar for buried boats entombed in pits next to the pyramids at Dashur, and assisting a larger project at Wadi Gawasis, on the Red Sea Coast, where a team led by Rodolfo Fattovich of the Universita Degli Studi di Napoli and Kathryn Bard of Boston University is documenting the remains of the harbor where Egypt's pharaohs launched voyages to Punt, and where caves have yielded timbers and rigging from Egyptian seagoing craft.
Other INA projects in Africa include Robin Piercy's landmark excavation with the National Museums of Kenya of the 17th-century Portuguese ship Santo Antonio de Tanna, wrecked in October 1697 off the coast at Mombasa, and the excavation by Ralph Pedersen of a 4th to 7th-century Byzantine shipwreck off the coast of Eritrea at Black Assarca Island.
