Archaeologist

Professional Biography

Martine Francis-Allouche is a terrestrial and maritime archaeologist with extensive academic credentials, including a BA and MA in Terrestrial Archaeology from the American University of Beirut, a degree in Maritime Archaeology from DRASSM/GRASM in Marseille, France and a PhD from Sorbonne Université – Paris I, where she specialized in the ancient harbor installations of Byblos.

She has held several leadership roles within the Lebanese Directorate General of Antiquities, serving as Regional Director for northern Mount Lebanon (1996–1998) and as a maritime archaeology advisor since 2011. Since 2010, she has been a Research Associate at the Collège de France, and she has been a member of ICOMOS-ICUCH since 2014. From 1998 to 2009, she collaborated closely with the pioneering British maritime archaeologist Honor Frost. Today, she continues Frost’s legacy through innovative geoarchaeological research. In 2011, she co-founded the “Byblos et la mer” project with Professor Nicolas Grimal, leading twelve multidisciplinary investigations funded by the Honor Frost Foundation. This work successfully identified the city’s primary harbor, a vital hub for the millennia-old timber trade with Pharaonic Egypt and the Mediterranean world.