George F. Bass

Dr. George F. Bass was the Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Nautical Archaeology and Former George T. and Gladys H. Abell Chair in Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University. Additionally, he was the founder of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. He was regarded as a pioneer in the field of underwater archaeology and conducted the world’s first scientific shipwreck excavation off of Cape Gelidonya on the Turkish coast in 1960. He founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in 1972 and excavated many shipwrecks in the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age through Byzantine periods, including the famous Uluburun ship, which sank c. 1300 BCE with a great wealth of metal and the earliest known wax writing tablet encased in hinged wood aboard, and the Serçe Limani shipwreck, an eleventh-century CE ship that yielded the largest collection of medieval Islamic glass in existence. Dr. Bass conducted underwater excavations in the Americas and developed new techniques and equipment for underwater research, including a submersible decompression chamber, a method of mapping via stereo-photography, and the first commercially built American research submersible. He was the recipient of the National Medal of Science (2002).