Is there a way to import all 16 mono wavs into Ardour as separate tracks? This is not a one-off task so I was thinking of writing a python script to create the project file based on the contents of a directory - but thought I should check if this has already been done.

You could save a template of the 16 mono track setup, and then load the wav files manually. Of course the "import one file per track" is always a good option... depends on how you want to run things.

Cheers, -Harry