George Bass (archaeologist)


George Fletcher Bass is recognized as one of the early practitioners of underwater archaeology, along with Peter Throckmorton, Honor Frost, and others.

Career

Bass was the co-director, alongside Joan du Plat Taylor, of the first archaeological expedition to entirely excavate an ancient shipwreck: Cape Gelidonya. Since directing his first excavation as a PhD student, he has excavated shipwrecks of the Bronze Age, Classical Age, and the Byzantine. Bass is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, where he held the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Chair in Nautical Archaeology. He holds an M.A. in Near Eastern Archaeology from The Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1966, Froelich Rainey, director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, authorized Bass to write a report on the Penn Museum's controversial accession of a set of gold objects believed to have come from the site of Troy, in what is now Turkey. The museum had purchased the gold from a private antiquities dealer. Bass, who at the time was assistant curator in the Mediterranean Section, wrote a report which influenced the museum's articulation of a statement on museum ethics. This was the Pennsylvania Declaration of 1970, which anticipated UNESCO's subsequent issue of the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership and Cultural Property.
In 1973 Bass founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

Awards

Bass was interviewed by Adam Davidson with colleague Fred van Doorninck on This American Life in 2010.

Books