George Fletcher Bass (1932–2021)

On 2 March 2021, George F. Bass, acknowledged around the world as the founding father of underwater archaeology, died in Bryan, Texas, at the age of 88. Ann Singletary Bass, his wife and steadfast partner of 60 years, was at his side. Bass was born in Columbia, South Carolina, on 9 December 1932 to parents Robert Bass and Virginia Wauchope. His father was a professor of English literature and his mother an anthologist of poetry; both were published authors, and their shared affinity for the English language was a source of family pride. Bass studied English literature at the University of Exeter and earned a master’s degree in Near Eastern archaeology from Johns Hopkins University (1955). As a student at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (1955–57) he helped excavate the House of the Tiles at Lerna with Jack Caskey and worked at Gordion with Rodney Young. After serving his country as a U.S. Army first lieutenant in South Korea (1957–59), Bass pursued a doctoral degree in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania (1959–64). In 1960, Bass made two wise and life-changing decisions. The first was to make a proposal of marriage to Ann Singletary. The second was heeding a directive from Rodney Young, who encouraged him to direct the excavation of a Bronze Age shipwreck identified by sponge diver Kemal Aras and photojournalist Peter Throckmorton the preceding year at Cape Gelidonya, Turkey. The result was the first scientific excavation of an ancient shipwreck by a small team of archaeologists who, rather than supervising excavation from the surface, dived themselves and assumed direct responsibility for uncovering, mapping, and raising artifacts.1 Bass and his team demonstrated that the objectives and accuracy of terrestrial archaeology could and should be applied under water. The impact of the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck continued to be felt after the pioneering 1960 excavation. Bass observed that pan-balance weights found in the wreck adhered to Near Eastern standards, and by comparing the copper oxhide-shaped ingots from the cargo with depictions in Egyptian tombs showing the same ingots carried by Syrians, he concluded that the vessel that sank at Cape Gelidonya around 1200 BCE belonged to a tinker of Syro-Canaanite or Cypriot origin.2 This thesis contradicted the prevailing perception that Late Bronze Age maritime trade lay exclusively in the hands of Mycenaean Greeks.