George Bass, Ph.D.

:: George Bass, Ph. D. - Science - 1974

Dr. George F. Bass was born in Columbia, South Carolina, on 9 December 1932. He graduated from The Johns Hopkins University in 1955 with an M.A. in Near Eastern archaeology, and then attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, for two years. During that time he gained excavation experience at Lerna, in Greece, and Gordion, in Turkey. From 1957 to 1959 he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and then began doctoral studies in classical archaeology at The University of Pennsylvania. In 1960 he was asked by his professor, Rodney S. Young, if he would learn to dive in order to direct the excavation of a Bronze Age shipwreck of around 1200 B.C. reported by journalist Peter Throckmorton off Cape Gelidonya, Turkey; it was the first ancient shipwreck excavated in its entirety on the seabed.

Bass devoted the rest of the 1960s to the excavation of two Byzantine shipwrecks

off Yassiada, Turkey, where he developed new tools and techniques for underwater research: a submersible decompression chamber, a method of mapping under water by stereo-photography, and a two-person submarine, Asherah, the first commercially-built American research submersible, launched in 1964, the year Bass received his doctorate and joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty. In 1967 his team was the first to locate an ancient wreck with sonar. In 1968, however, he returned to land archaeology to spend a summer with Professor Spiridon Marinatos in the initial excavation campaign at a Bronze Age city covered by volcanic ash on the Greek island of Santorini. In 1971 he directed the excavation on land of a preclassical site in southern Italy.

In 1973 Bass left the University of Pennsylvania in order to establish the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA), which in 1976 affiliated with Texas A&M University, where until his retirement in 2000 he was a professor of nautical archaeology. INA conducts research on four continents, and has excavated the oldest known wrecks in the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas, but Bass continued to concentrate on shipwrecks in Turkey, including wrecks of the 14th, 6th, and 5th centuries B.C., and the 5th, 7th, and 11th centuries A.D.

In 1986 Bass received the Archaeological Institute of America's Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement, and a Lowell Thomas Award from the Explorers Club. The next year he received an honorary doctorate from Boghazici University in Istanbul, and in 1998 received a similar degree from the University of Liverpool. The National Geographic Society awarded him its La Gorce Gold Medal in 1979 and, in 1988, one of its 15 Centennial Awards. In 1999 he received the J.C. Harrington Medal from The Society for Historical Archaeology, and in 2002 President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Science. He has written or edited seven books and more than a hundred articles, and has lectured around the world; his projects have been televised internationally. The books include Archaeology Under Water (1966), A History of Seafaring Based on Underwater Archaeology (1973), Archaeology Beneath the Sea (1975), Yassi Ada I: A Seventh-Century Byzantine Shipwreck (1982), Ships and Shipwrecks of the Americas (1988), Serce Limani I: An Eleventh-Century Shipwreck (2004) and Beneath the Seven Seas: Adventures with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (2005). With his wife Ann he divides his time between College Station, Texas, and Bodrum, Turkey, where he was made an honorary citizen of the city. They have two grown sons, Gordon and Alan.