In the early spring of 2021, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) and the Nautical Archaeology Program (NAP) of Texas A&M University received six boxes of approximately 6,000 3x5in index cards featuring over 3,200 nautical terms in over 180 dialects and languages. The collection represents years of data compilation related to nautical features and terms of Mediterranean seafaring and their non-English counterparts. These notecards were donated by Alan H. Hartley, an independent scholar and lexicographer. The thousands of notecards with nautical terms were a compilation of decades of research by Hartley, culminating in a proposal created in 1994 called, Historical Dictionary of Mediterranean Nautical Terms. Hartley’s cards were ‘an outright gift to INA, the only stipulations being that [INA] keep the cards safe and put them to good use.’

That same spring, the notecards were digitized as pdf files, and INA President and Texas A&M professor Deborah Carlson submitted and received a grant from Texas A&M’s Arts & Humanities Fellows Program to pursue a more in-depth project to put the notecards’ contents ‘to good use’ to build an ‘Illustrated Multilingual Lexicon of Nautical Terminology and Shipbuilding Technology.’ 

Since the fall of 2022, NAP doctoral candidates Bethany Becktell and Claire Zak have led research teams of undergraduate and graduate students through Texas A&M’s Aggie Research Program (ARP) and the Department of Anthropology’s Graduate-Undergraduate Mentorship Program to transcribe and build this first illustrated multilingual lexicon of nautical terminology and shipbuilding technology made available to the public in a searchable, open-access digital database. Along with Carlson’s grant, Becktell and Zak received research fellowships in the fall of 2023 and 2024 from Texas A&M’s Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) to help fund the development of a new website for the lexicon database. 

The Nautical Lexicon Project is the collective effort of numerous undergraduate and graduate student researchers to create an open-access, interactive, and comprehensive digital site and database of Hartley’s collection of nautical terms regarding Mediterranean seafaring as well as an extensive accompanying bibliography.