Dr Lucy Semaan

Lucy Semaan is the lead maritime archaeologist of the Honor Frost Foundation (HFF) in Lebanon. She is also a visiting lecturer at the Department of History and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where she teaches the Minor in Marine Sciences and Culture (MSCU) program.

Dr Semaan has been involved in the field of archaeology since the mid-1990s. She obtained her Masters in Maritime Archaeology from the University of Southampton, UK in 2008 and her PhD in Arab and Islamic studies with a focus on maritime archaeology from the University of Exeter, UK in 2014. Between 2015 and 2018, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Museology at the University of Balamand, Lebanon. Since 2019, Dr Semaan is heading the rescue team of maritime archaeologists established by the HFF in Lebanon. She has also been assisting the Foundation in its capacity-building initiatives in Lebanon since its inception. As such, she helped coordinate and lead the first Nautical Archaeological Society (NAS) field school in the country destined for students and diving amateurs of archaeology, as well as for professional archaeologists.

She has been diving since 2001 and holds a SSI XR technical diving qualification. For the past two decades, she has participated in and managed several archaeological projects in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia. Her research interests include maritime cultural landscapes and seascapes; coastal and underwater geomorphology; capacity building; rescue Archaeology; Archaeology in conflict zones; maritime ethnography; and traditional wooden boatbuilding.