Person of the Week
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.
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