Pedersen holds a doctorate from the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University. His dissertation entitled "The Boatbuilding Sequence in the Gilgamesh Epic and the Sewn Boat Relation" examines and reinterprets the construction of the Ark of the Deluge in light of archaeological and ethnographic evidence in Arabia, Africa, and India. The focus of this work is that the ark as depicted in the epic was of sewn construction, a determination that pushes back the technology to the 13th century B.C. A popular article on this was the cover feature for Biblical Archaeology Review in 2005. Pedersen is currently the principal investigator for nautical archaeology projects in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. He has been a team 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 in 1993; excavated a 1500-year-old shipwreck at Black Assarca Island, Eritrea; surveyed shipwrecks off New York'sLong Island, and served as an Associate Director of India's Kadakkarapally Boat Project, which involved a thousand-year-old ship found under a coconut grove in Kerala. In 2004 he conducted an underwater survey at Tell el-Burak in Lebanon, and in 2007 in the waters off the early Bronze Age tell at Fadous-Kfarabida for the American University of Beirut. Pedersen has been a research associate with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, based at Texas A&M University, since 1992. In 2012, Pedersen along with colleagues from Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany began a multi-year Red Sea coast to locate and document shipwrecks and ancient harbors. Also in the same year he conducted a re-assessment of the archaeological site in Beirut, Lebanon known as the "Venus Towers Site," which was claimed by a local activist group to be a Phoenician port. Pedersen’s study refuted that determination as no evidence was found to support the maritime interpretation of the site, and that specific features within the site demonstrated the impossibility of the use of the place for ships. In 2014, Pedersen founded the Red Sea Institute for Anthropological Research. http://www.redseainstitute.org/ In addition to his doctorate, Pedersen holds a BA in Anthropology and Linguistics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and an MA in Anthropology/Nautical Archaeology from Texas A&M University.
