Affiliation: Texas A&M University
Nautical archaeology has been a passion of Dr. Castro since high school, and he has worked for Lisbon’s National Museum of Archaeology as an amateur since the early 1990s. In 1996 he joined a government agency which studied and protected for the Portuguese cultural heritage, and there he assisted in the creation of a state agency for Nautical Archaeology. Professor Castro also co-directed the archaeological excavation of an early 17th-Century shipwreck at the mouth of the Tagus River.
This work eventually lead him to leave his managing career and enroll in the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University, where he finished his PhD in 2001, and started a teaching career.
Presently Dr. Castro is Associate Professor in the Nautical Archaeology Program of the Department of Anthropology of Texas A&M University. He is the Director of the Ship Reconstructing Laboratory of the University’s Centre for Maritime History and Conservation, and investigator at its affiliated Institute of Nautical Archaeology.
He is the author of A Nau de Portugal (2003) and the Pepper Wreck, A Portuguese Indiaman at the Mouth of the Tagus River (2005), and is currently working on a book about Iberian shipbuilding in the 16th and 17th centuries.
