INTERVIEW

One of the world's great explorers and the father of underwater archaeology
raises treasures from a Bronze Age shipwreck-the oldest one ever found-and
celebrates some other raptures of the deep

GEORGE BASS

Late summer is not kind to College Station, Texas. But you'd never know it in
this office, where cold air pumps, as in a deep-sea bathysphere, giving the room
the cool sweet taste ot compressed air from a scuba tank. Volumes line the
walls, great books of the ancient world that whisper ot lost secrets and hidden
treasures. There is something at once mystical and scientific here, not unlike
exploring the depths of the ocean floor. It's no accident.

A few months a year this home office is haven to the father of underwater
archaeology. For 30 years George Bass has lived with the challenge of
uncovering the most precious sunken treasure of all: knowledge-historical
knowledge of Bronze Age mariners, Babylonian and Byzantine merchants, Egyptian
pharaohs. Finding the oldest book on record is just one of his accomplishments.
Indiana Jones got nothin' on him.

Most of the time Bass works in the field. That could be on or beneath any large
body of water. But much of his research is in the seas off the coast of Turkey,
where numerous ancient shipwrecks have yet to exhaust their mysteries.

Bass is not the ancient mariner but a fit and youthful fifty-eight. When he was
ten, he and his brother tried to make a diving helmet, which he never tried out
in the water. Even as a graduate student at the American School of Classical
Studies in Athens, Bass admits he never got around to actual diving, even though
"I probably had more books on diving than archaeology on my desk." In fact, he
strapped a scuba tank on his back only once before his first major excavation in
1960.

Yet he was "fated" for the work. With a master's degree in Near Eastern
archaeology from Johns Hopkins, a Ph.D. in archaeology with a specialty in the
Bronze Age between 3000 and 1000 B.C., and a desire to dive, he was the right
man in the right place. In 1959 photojournalist Peter Throckmorton approached
the University of Pennsylvania, where Bass was a graduate student, with news
he'd found a Bronze Age shipwreck. "We didn't know at the time," says Bass,
"that it was going to change ideas about the entire relationship between the
Mycenaeans, Bronze Age Greeks, and Phoenicians. If I hadn't had a background in
Near Eastern and preclassical archaeology, I might not have realized the
significance embodied in this wreck."

In 1973 Bass founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which later joined
forces with Texas A&M University. That's how an ocean explorer came to live in
a Texas prairie town. Its elite graduate-level program includes only around ten
students a year, about a third of whom come from outside the United States.
Bass remains an active and enthusiastic teacher, evaluated by students as one of
the best. That honor, he says, ranks right up there with receiving the National
Geographic Society Centennial Award, which recognizes him as one of the
century's great explorers.

He is currently excavating a fourteenth-century B.C. shipwreck at Ulu Burun,
Turkey. The oldest known wreck in the world, it may represent a royal ship
carrying copper, tin, gold, silver, ebony, glass, amber, and resins from one
king to another. The vessel's loss in antiquity, Bass thinks, must have been
devastating.

Omni: You really didn't learn scuba until a few weeks before your first trip to
Turkey in 1960?

Bass: The excavation of that shipwreck off Cape Gelidonya led to my learning how
to dive, and I thought it would be a one-summer lark. But there were two things
that challenged me at the time. One was the site's historical significance.
And now we're going back there where we thought we'd excavated everything thirty
years ago, and finding evidence we couldn't with more primitive equipment. The
second thing was I figured out how we had to adapt normal land techniques to the
underwater world. Throughout the Sixties I spent much more time thinking about
diving technology than about archaeology. Now I think almost nothing about the
technology.

Omni: You've wrestled with finding a name for your field of study. You go from
"underwater" to "nautical" archaeology. Why?

Bass: "Nautical" comes from the Greek word naos, meaning ship. And we specialize
in studying ships, whether they're underwater, under land, or in rivers. We now
have specialists in hulls or rigging, whereas I deal mainly with the cargoes and
possessions of crew and passengers. In the early Sixties, in Archaeology Under
Water, I said we don't call people jungle, or mountain or desert,
archaeologists, The same should hold true for us, except for those who
specialize in ships per se. I'm an "underwater" archaeologist only in the sense
that what I do is underwater. All of us who pioneered this field worked first in
terrestrial archaeology, to which I return from time to time.

Omni: You are more interested, then, in ships than harbors, inland lakes or the
wells at Chichen Itza?

Bass: Yes. Our institute is excavating the sunken city of Port Royal, Jamaica,
which went down in 1692 in an earthquake, but it's sort of an anomaly. It's
shallow, and therefore good training ground for our teams. We hope to continue
there, but it's not nautical archaeology.

Omni: Has the emotional strain of working underwater lessened over the years?

Bass: It's not so adventurous as when we started out working from small fishing
and sponge boats, or an old wooden barge that leaked badly. Now we have a
steel-hulled fifty-five-foot vessel with a decompression chamber onboard. In
the last several years we haven't missed a single dive, because on-site we have
a full-time mechanic, captain, and physician. I find it more pleasant working
on an underwater site than on land. Mealtime conversations are more interesting
because you have mechanics, physicians, and photographers and not just
archaeologists who think archaeology all day.

Bass: Do you find more valuable information underwater than on land?

Bass: In some respects, yes. The wreck we're excavating now at Ulu Burun shows
how often things have disappeared on land because they've been destroyed by
humans. We have the earliest examples of tin and glass ingots found, and the
first examples of ebony logs. We have six tons of copper ingots. All this raw
material, and more, would have been manufactured into finished products or goods
when it arrived in port and simply disappeared without a trace. A century of
excavation in the Near East and throughout the Aegean yielded not a tin or glass
ingot. We have dozens of them on this one wreck-plus the only gold scarab ever
found of Nefertiti. Had that remained on land, it probably would have been
melted down eventually and made into something else.

The Greeks regarded their bronze statues as their highest works of art.
Virtually all we have came from the sea, mostly pulled up in fishermen's nets or
found by sponge divers rather than by archaeologists. Twenty-three years ago in
Turkey, with side-scan sonar in our little two-person submarine, Asherah, we
found a three-hundred-foot-deep wreck that had yielded three bronze statues to
fishermen's nets. Our photographs suggest there are more bronze statues under
the sand on this wreck. We hope to get back to it soon with deep diving, which
requires mixed gases, like heliox, rather than just compressed air.

Omni: Some of your colleagues have gotten the bends. Have you?

Bass: In 1985 I had a very minor case, a bit of nagging pain in my elbow that
disappeared in our decompression chamber. The same year we had the second
serious case we've had in thirty years when our expedition physician was
paralyzed from the waist down. He was treated and almost completely cured in
the chamber. The one thing we had in common is that we were both in our fifties.
When I began in 1960, I was the youngest member of the excavation; suddenly I
realized I was the oldest. That's when I decided I'd been diving enough.

The wreck at Ulu Burun is one hundred forty-five to one-eighty feet deep. I'm
directing the project, but the fieldwork is directed by a graduate student. If
we do another wreck, say, one hundred feet down, I'll work at that depth. For
about a week every year, we return to the site at Cape Gelidonya where I
started. Other than that, I'm not diving anymore.

Omni: Have you ever had panic set in at a site, because of equipment failure?

Bass: In twenty-five years of very active diving, I was really only frightened
once, and when I say frightened, I mean I thought the end was near. Because I'd
done a land dig, I hadn't dived in three years. This was only the second or
third dive and I hadn't planned it carefully. I was about one hundred fifty
feet deep when I ran out of air. My reserve didn't work. Those were the years
before we had seethrough gauges where you always know how much air you have. My
partner and I had split up. I would have drowned had he not noticed me and come
to my assistance for buddy breathing when he saw me struggling toward the
surface.

We're a bit superstitious about our safety record, so we don't like to brag
about it. We've had around ten thousand dives on just this most recent wreck.
That's a lot of deep decompression dives at one-forty- to one-eighty- feet
depth.

Omni: What is your most thrilling moment underwater?

Bass: I know you won't believe this, but-never. The
hair-stands-up-on-the-back-of-my-neck excitement comes in the library at, say,
three A.M. When I first went down at Ulu Burun I was thinking, Where are we
going to put the airlift? How are we going to map it? With only twenty minutes,
you don't have time to be overly romantic. I enjoy the feeling of being
underwater, the freedom. But diving is not where the excitement comes. We don't
understand the significance of something when we find it. Even a gold medallion
from the Bronze Age-it's pretty, everybody wants to see it, but just finding it
hasn't got that tingling excitement of suddenly realizing it means something
important.

Omni: How did your academic background help on your first excavation?

Bass: A Near Eastern archaeologist might have thought everything onboard was
Near Eastern; a preclassical archaeologist might have thought everything was
Bronze Age Greek. With a background in both, I saw the influence of Phoenician
culture on Greek civilization in a completely new light. It changed ideas about
trade; it even had an impact on our interpretation and dating of Homer. And we
discovered the oldest "book" ever found, a wooden writing tablet in a vase of
pomegranates about five feet tall. We found not only seeds but parts of
pomegranate skins. The book was probably sitting on the lid and someone hid it
inside to keep it safe from the elements.

Omni: Why at one point did you think about changing fields?

Bass: I left underwater archaeology in 1969, when I spent time in a
decompression chamber with a dead sponge diver who died while we were trying to
treat him. And I thought, I don't want to stick around until I pull a dead
friend from the water. So I didn't work in underwater archaeology for four
years. I started a dry land dig in southern Italy, but as I worked there, I
missed the excitement of finding whole objects rather than bits and pieces. We
were trying to find out about the introduction of certain types of pottery and
domestic animals into the region. I thought, If they came across the Adriatic
from present-day Yugoslavia, there must be one shipwreck out there that's going
to tell us as much as digging here year after year.

I missed the sea. There's something special about working on the sea. And I
especially missed the comradeship of the mixture of people who go into
underwater archaeology. Another thing that made me go back to it was Eric Ryan,
a dear friend who suffered an air embolism and never did regain full sensation
down one part of his body. He told me I should go back to it, that it had all
been worth it, that of course you can be safe if you just sit in your house all
day, but there are things other than that.

Another reason I'd given it up was because I was told by the chief of United
States Navy salvage that I was running the largest diving operation in the world
in 1969. No one, he said, had up to thirty divers going down one hundred thirty
feet twice a day, six days a week for three months a year. I was doing this
while teaching and publishing-without even a secretary. Well, what I did was
form the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. Now I don't have to personally buy
all the equipment each year, end up with a hammer and nails packing it in
crates, carry it on dollies to a rented truck, drive it to the ship, ship it to
Turkey, and get it through customs all by myself.

Now the equipment is ordered by our mechanic in Turkey. Our boat is kept up by
our captain, who is also a diver and has a degree in business administration.
The vessel simply arrives on the site with all the compressors, generators,
fresh-water makers, chambers, galleys full of food. We have conservators
working full-time in Turkey mending pottery. We even have full-time illustrators
drawing the material, and photographers doing beautiful underwater photographs
and the detail photography in museums.

Omni: Do you ever have trouble with marine life at the site?

Bass: Until three years ago, we'd never seen a shark. But recently at Ulu Burun
a shark goes by maybe one hundred meters away. Our greatest fear is that the
site seems almost a breeding ground for a kind of scorpion fish. So we keep a
spear lying at the site. Twice people have gotten scorpion fish spines into
their fingers on land and almost gone into shock from the pain. If a diver put
his knee on one at onesixty feet and suddenly panicked, he'd be in serious
trouble. I don't know why there are so many here, but every year we have to
kill about half a dozen.

Omni: When you come across a wreck, what are your first thoughts?

Bass: Its date. Judging the forms of antiquities-Bronze Age, classical Greek,
Roman, Byzantine, medieval, or later-is fairly easy. Then we raise a few
diagnostic artifacts to pin down the date to a century. During the last decade
we've found seventy-five to eighty ancient wrecks along a small part of the
Turkish coast.

Our ultimate aim is to excavate one merchant ship from every century of
antiquity. Then we'd have told the entire story of hulls and pottery, weights
and coins and everything. Then we'd perhaps focus on types of merchant ships,
then move to warships, ferryboats, fishing boats, and so on. Essentially, we'd
like to tell the story of seafaring with firsthand evidence. A set of tools
from a ship of every period of antiquity would tell the history of tools better
than it's been exhibited on land.

Omni: What's so important about the Bronze Age shipwreck you're excavating now?

Bass: It has an impact on the history of maritime trade, on international
relations, and even Egyptology. The scarab of Nefertiti suggests to some
Egyptologists that she was coruler of Egypt with her husband, Akhenaton. It has
an impact on the study of literacy. This wooden tablet with its wax writing
surfaces is something mentioned by Homer, but previously people didn't think
these existed in the Bronze Age [3000 to 1000 B.C.] when the Trojan War took
place. They did. With materials from eight cultures on this vessel, we have a
broad spectrum of how they worked together. Our discoveries bring to life
contemporary correspondence between various kings describing the trading and
types of goods that were on the ships. We can't work without reading these
ancient documents. And now people studying documents have to pay attention to
what we're finding.

Colleagues working with me on a wreck only one thousand years old at Limani,
Turkey, think that's even more important. The curator of Islamic art at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York said that had we not found all these
types of glazed bowls, which we date to about A.D.1025, art historians would
have dated some of them to the ninth and perhaps twelfth century. With its
three tons of medieval glass onboard, this wreck contains more Islamic glass
than all the collections in all the glass museums in the world-then you multiply
it by ten or a hundred and still don't come up with a reasonable figure. Not
being an expert in medieval or Byzantine art, I decided to farm out most of the
work to those specializing in categories of the find. But Fred Van Doorninck,
who started with me in 1961, said, "George, you've got to get emotionally and
intellectually involved in the wreck. You've got to publish part of it
yourself."

So I took the dregs, the little miscellaneous finds that would be passed over in
one or two sentences in the average archaeological report. "And we found eight
bone spindle whorls" or "We found fragments of three combs," they'd say, and
leave it at that. I took the spindle whorls. It was fairly easy to find out
they were carved somewhere along the Syro-Palestinian coast. But why were they
on this ship? Everything's carried for a reason.

By plotting their position on our plan of the site, I found they were not
scattered randomly but in specific clusters in areas where fishermen were
repairing their nets. It dawned on me that maybe fishermen were spinning
threads to mend their nets. Then I stumbled onto something written by an Arab a
century before the ship sank saying that spinning goat hair was a manly thing,
unlike spinning flax, which only women did. We analyzed a few fibers of thread
still surviving in a lead net sinker. It was goat hair. Then I talked to an
eighty-three-year-old fisherman who said goat hair was the best thread for his
nets. It doesn't absorb water like wool. An Ottoman net turned out to have
goat hair as well. Finally I ran into a reference from the Thirties about modern
Danes mending their nets with spindles and whorls. "That clinches it," I
thought. "That's what they were doing."

Then a history professor wrote me, saying that one spindle whorl found at the
Viking site in Newfoundland led them to reason that a woman must have been
present. But if, in fact, these were not used just by women, this might not be
a more permanent colony but just a fishing station. Rethinking what a single
spindle whorl means could change our ideas about the discovery and colonization
of early America by the Vikings.

Omni: Did the Minotaur or Labyrinth actually exist?

Bass: I believe the story is a mythological representation of the downfall of
King Minos of Crete, where we know the bull was worshipped. In his excavations
at the Minoan capital and at Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans found many depictions of
double axes, and the word for that in antiquity is labrys. If you look at this
mazelike palace today, you'll see the bottom floor is in corridors. That fact
could easily have led to the idea of Theseus being lost inside and finding his
way out only with the aid of a thread laid out by Minos's daughter Ariadne.
Theseus, king of Greece, killing the Minotaur could represent the Mycenaean
Greek dominance of Crete by overcoming the Minoans.

Atlantis, too, may have a basis in fact. Some people would say Plato simply
made up the story to make a point. But it's not impossible that the destruction
of the island of Thera by volcanic eruption led to the story of a civilization
sinking beneath the waves. I don't think Atlantis is out in the middle of the
Atlantic somewhere.

Omni: Have any of your findings verified mythological stories?

Bass: Everything we've found on our wrecks has tended to corroborate what Homer,
who presumably lived in the late Iron Age [after 1000 B.C.]. wrote about the
Bronze Age. We found brushwood dunnage, a protective liner underneath cargo, on
the Cape Gelidonya and Ulu Burun ships. Homer has Odysseus putting brushwood
dunnage in the boat he built to leave Calypso's island. Homer often wrote about
Phoenician metalworkers and sailors. People said, "Well, it's anachronistic."
But our wrecks have shown the Bronze Age Phoenicians were active seafarers and
metalsmiths or at least seemed to be carrying a lot of metal around the Eastern
Mediterranean. Iron Age Phoenicians became tremendous explorers and seafarers,
sailing out into the Atlantic. There's reason to believe a Phoenician sailor
circumnavigated Africa.

Omni: What's the significance of the glass ingots you found at Kas?

Bass: In 1972 Leo Oppenheim, a Near Eastern linguist, speculated that a brief
passage in cuneiform on a fourteenth-century clay tablet suggested the king of
Tyre was shipping raw glass to the Pharaoh in Egypt. Now we've found on a ship
from that period, probably sailing from the Levantine coast where the king of
Tyre lived, dozens of cobalt-blue glass ingots unique in the world. They are
chemically identical to Egyptian and Mycenaean blue glass. So all the blue
glass in the eastern Mediterranean was probably being shipped from one area
where someone had a secret recipe for making it.

Omni: What's so important about trade patterns?

Bass: They're not! [laughter] Okay, they tell how ideas spread. If my ideas
about Phoenician seafarers in the Aegean are correct, some theories about Near
Eastern influences on classical Greek civilization may be more accurate than
some scholars admit. I like to think that archaeologists' findings that
increase understanding of the past could help us make better judgments. How can
we really make decisions on politics, religion, or morals if we don't know how
these things actually came about?

Omni: Aside from carbon 14, what's the most accurate dating of age?

Bass: A large number of coins. One 1926 quarter in your pocket doesn't mean
much. But if we find sixty coins all from about the same date, never later than
a certain year, we can assume the ship sank about the time the coins stopped.
After coins, pottery. You can tell by sight whether a car was made in the
Thirties or Fifties. Like cars or clothing, the styles of pottery changed. I
can look up a piece of pottery in the library and date it to within a century,
sometimes even to a few decades.

The greatest breakthrough for the study of ancient ships will be when we have a
complete dendrochronology [dating of wood age] going back to the Bronze Age.
Peter Kuniholm at Cornell is devoting his life to building up such a sequence of
tree rings from the present day in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. He's
taken drillings from very old cedars in Lebanon and in Byzantine churches. If we
have a piece of keel or brushwood, dendrochronology will tell us exactly when
that wood was cut. It will indicate the year the ship sank much more precisely
than carbon 14, thermoluminescence, or pottery. Omni: Might some of the pottery
be a lot older than the wreck itself?

Bass: Ah, yes. If you were to have dinner with me, you'd have a cup that
belonged to my great-grandmother or a plate of my wife's great-grandmother. We
tend to keep pottery, porcelain, or china for generations. I didn't think it
would happen on ships, where things get broken by the rolling and pitching. We
first dated the Ulu Burun shipwreck in the first half of the fourteenth century,
based on a Bronze Age Greek cup and pitcher. But the Nefertiti scarab indicates
that date is at least half a century too early. That pottery was simply old and
still being used.

Fred Van Doorninck has proved some amphorae on later ships were in use for more
than a century. It's incredible that something as fragile as pottery could have
been used in cargoes, put in holds, and taken out scores of times over a century
without being broken. He's even shown where the handles have broken off and
their stubs have been filed down. They'd put a new slip or wash of clay on the
pot, carve new graffiti, and use it again and again. Dating is always an
educated guess, unless you find an inscription saying, "l, Captain So-and-so in
the year of So-and-so's reign," and of course that's a dream. But we'll find it
one day.

Omni: How do you pinpoint specific wreck sites?

Bass: In the Mediterranean, sighting remains one hundred percent the eyes of
sponge divers. But the sponge industry is dying, so there's not many more years
of that. In the Caribbean, documents in Spanish archives describe where a wreck
is. Then you can go look for it with a magnetometer. There is little or no
iron on these ships in the Mediterranean, whereas I've gone out on a reef in the
Caribbean and found four wrecks in one morning because of all the cannons and
anchors of iron. We've used sonar in the Mediterranean with success. I believe
ours was the first group to find an ancient shipwreck with side-scan sonar back
in 1967.

Omni: And that's strictly finding a protuberance underwater?

Bass: Right. Once we did a threemonth random survey down the Turkish coast.
Half the time we used sidescan sonar and underwater television. We found one
wreck. Then we went with sponge divers and found a dozen wrecks in the next few
weeks. They would go to a spot and tell us precisely where to dive and there
would be the wreck right there.

Omni: What are the inherent difficulties of underwater mapping?

Bass: Only the limitation of time. If we went to saturation diving, where the
diver could work seven hours a day, we'd beat that problem. Now each diver gets
twenty minutes at a time twice a day. I spent a large part of the Sixties
developing new methods of mapping underwater, first with various grids, then
with photography and eventually stereophotogrammetry, three-D mapping with
stereophotographs as is done by airplane. We developed a system that uses a
submarine-that's now standard on all small research submarines throughout the
world. But on this Bronze Age shipwreck, we've gone back to meter tapes and
triangulation. It's very accurate, and there's nothing to break down.

Omni: Can you tell if pollution has affected the wrecks?

Bass: So far, they seem to be insulated. I've heard horror stories about the
sludge being a half meter thick off the coast of well-populated areas of Italy
and France. But I don't think it's gotten under the sand and hurt anything yet.
I can certainly see the difference in Mediterranean pollution. When we used to
dive it was so clear you'd go three months without seeing anything. Now at
times when I'm decompressing I seem to be swimming in a sea of plastic bags.
Millions of bits of plastic; it's like a ticker-tape parade. This is in an
isolated part of Turkey.

Omni: Do you think underwater colonies are practical?

Bass: Not at the moment, except perhaps as research stations. And remote
vehicles and submersibles are doing a lot of that work. In the late Sixties I
planned to design a roving wheeled habitat in which for months you could travel
along the seabed and find unlimited numbers of wrecks. Your batteries would
essentially be your ballast and you could send these to the surface or have them
recharged with cables.

You'd carry oxygen, C02 scrubbers, and so on and just live for a month doing
what sponge divers do to find so many wrecks: move slowly along the seabed.
Well, I stopped that kind of designing. No one took me seriously because I was
an archaeologist. I couldn't get government support for the fresh ideas we were
way ahead of the engineers on. The Navy finally gave us a grant to develop our
stereophotograph technique, which is now standard practice for mapping the
seabed from small submersibles.

Omni: In 1989 you got the Navy to declassify some detailed maps of the ocean
floor that they'd withheld because of concern over Soviet submarine activity.

Bass: You didn't get that from me! And I don't know whether it helped much.
What I'd like to get declassified are aerial surveys. You can spot ballast
piles in shallow water. With water-penetrating film we might be able to go
deeper, When I approached the United States government about satellite or aerial
pictures, they told me to go to the Turkish government. When the Turkish
military heard about that, they got so exercised it almost stopped our work in
Turkey forever,

There's good reason for countries to be nervous about archaeologists as spies.
Every archaeology professor I ever had was in the OSS in World War II. Who else
knew the countryside, languages, mountain paths as well? There was a saying, the
Greek mountains were white with the parachutes of British archaeologists being
sent in. My uncle, an archaeologist, was in the OSS and was dressed like a
French peasant.

Omni: Was the real reason the Titanic got explored because the government saw an
opportunity to use equipment that might have military applications?

Bass: That's what I heard, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's so. We ourselves
found this deep statue-bearing shipwreck in Turkey because of our contract to
evaluate three new types of sidescan sonar. I said at the time to Captain
Snyder, who later became oceanographer of the Navy, "Why in the world is the
Navy paying a bunch of archaeologists to test sonar?" He said we could do it
much more cheaply. We had our own submersible; the Navy had all the regulations
and red tape. We could just go out and do it. They weren't interested in what
we found: they just wanted to know which type of sonar would find it the best.

Omni: Should the Titanic and Bismarck be left as underwater monuments?

Bass: They're not archaeological; they may become archaeological. But if you go
that route, you should never bulldoze any kind of building because someday
everything will be archaeological. In the case of the Titanic, there's an
argument for leaving it alone. Some structures are simply so famous, so much a
part of our cultural environment, they should be left alone. The Titanic is a
landmark and should be left alone for that reason, not for the same reasons as
leaving a Bronze Age shipwreck alone.

Omni: What are your views about this whole mess of admiralty law or lack of law
that seems to protect more sites on land than sea? The notion of marine salvage
is in a real state of flux.

Bass: I testified before Congress to get the bill passed to protect historic
shipwrecks and had no trouble whatsoever countering and beating the best lawyers
of treasure hunters. I was pleased to see senators on C-Span using my
word-for-word arguments: Why is it all right to tear up a historic shipwreck
when you can't do it to a land monument like the Alamo or Mount Vernon? I could
find an Indian burial mound, bulldoze it, and sell the pots and say it's free
enterprise. People would say, "That's immoral; send him to jail," Previously in
American waters you could do that; the new law stops it,

The treasure hunter will take this argument: "There are millions of shipwrecks
out there; how come they're so worried if we go after these few Spanish
galleons?" Unfortunately, the treasure hunter and the archaeologist will be
going after the same ship because it is an important one. There are very few
known ships from the early period of New World exploration, the time directly
after Columbus. We know more about how Greek and Roman ships were built than
those of Columbus and the explorers who immediately followed after him.

Our institute has been looking at wrecks in the Bahamas, Turks, Caicos, and
elsewhere. Without exception, they've all been looted. In one, the hull was
dynamited and broken into one week before our team got there. Between the time
our crew went down and made a sketch of it and came back, a hole had been blown
in the middle. Off France and Italy, most visible wrecks in sport-diving depths
have been stripped clean of their amphorae. In 1976 we surveyed site after site
where there had been huge piles of amphorae described, and every single one was
gone.

As for what happens to wrecks in open seas in the middle of oceans, I'm not wise
enough to judge. There have been Mediterranean countries that have said the
material from those wrecks should return to the country of cultural origin. This
is such a nutty idea. The Greeks were making bronze statues in what is now
Turkey and Italy. Does that statue go to Greece, Turkey, or Italy? Imagine a
jury listening to archaeologists argue for ten years on the evidence of what
nationality a ship is! We don't know the nationality of the Ulu Burun ship.
There's something there from Egypt, Cyprus, the Syro-Palestinian coast, and
Greece. Where does it go? I'd only hope it would all stay together and go to one
museum.

Omni: What do you think of Mel Fisher's handling of the Atocha?

Bass: The Atocha was not archaeologically excavated, and I'm not happy with any
wreck that's excavated in that manner. We know to the centimeter where
everything is found. I spend endless hours making color-coded maps of the
distribution of things on our wrecks. The treasure hunter and archaeologist
cannot really cooperate. The archaeologist wants to take as long as possible to
do things, whereas the hunter has to move as quickly as possible to make a
profit. I've just written seventy-five pages on a pair of scissors we found ten
years ago. We didn't know they existed until last year. Since these were found
with part of a delousing comb and a razor, it seems like a little barber's kit.
That got me into the area of shipboard toiletries. These would have been
overlooked by treasure hunters and sucked up the air lift.

In the end a big part of our work is just curiosity-knowing that sailors on a
thousand-year-old ship had problems grooming their hair because of lice. Just a
tidbit. In that sense it's like an interesting hobby. I'm not being cynical,
but I don't want to exaggerate the importance of archaeology any more than any
other activity humans take pleasure in. But if we only worry about growing food
and making bridges, then we won't be human.



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NAME: George Fletcher Bass

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AGE: Fifty-eight

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POSITION: Founder and director, Institute of Nautical Archaology

*

CURRENT EXCAVATION: Oldest known shipwreck, producing oldest known tin and
glass ingots, writing materials, and first gold scarab of Nefertiti

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TIMES DIVED: More than 50,000 decompression dives

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TECHNOLOGY INVENTED: Two-person submarine, submersible decompression chamber,
underwater telephone booth, stereophotogrammetry for underwater mapping

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MOST RECENT BOOK WRITTEN (OF SIX): Ships and Shipwrecks of the America (Thames
and Hudson)

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ON TREASURE HUNTING: It's incompatible with archaeology; it destroys
information.