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George Bass

Much of human history is hidden beneath the waves: Some 3,000,000 
shipwrecks may rest on the world’s seabeds. But archaeologists had 
to rely on professional divers for scraps of information about these sites 
until the 1960s, when George Bass began to apply rigorous excavation 
techniques to underwater wrecks. Over the next half century, Bass led 
groundbreaking studies of Late Bronze Age (1600-1100 B.C.) shipwrecks 
off the coast of Turkey, along with sites from many other periods. Along 
the way, he transformed underwater archaeology from an amateur’s 
pastime to a modern scientific discipline. Those achievements earned 
him a National Medal of Science in 2002.