This book forms a final report on the underwater excavations I directed at Yassi Ada, Turkey, during the summers of 1961 through 1964 for the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. The excavation was the first to have been completed on the floor of the Mediterranean of a wreck with substantial hull remains. This pioneering work required the ingenuity, effort, and generosity of many people and institutions.
The seventh- century ship was chosen for primary excavation not only for its lesser depth, which allowed longer working dives, but also because Throckmorton had uncovered traces of its timbers just beneath the sand and because it was more intelligible from the a stack of concreted iron anchors, lying across the cargo at its upper end, suggested the forward part of the ship pointing up the slope, toward Yassi Ada, while a mass of broken terra-cotta tiles and cooking ware suggested the galley—and, presumably, the stern—at the deeper end of the site.
George Fletcher Bass is recognized as the father of underwater archaeology.
Bass was the director of the first archaeological expedition to entirely excavate an ancient shipwreck: Cape Gelidonva (1960). Since directing his first excavation, he has excavated shipwrecks of the Bronze Age, Classical Age, and the Byzantine. Bass is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, where he held the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Chair in Nautical Archaeology. He holds an M.A. in Near Eastern Archaeology from The Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1973 Bass founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA). INA has conducted some of the most important excavations of the twentieth century, and its findings throw new light into areas as diverse as the beginning of the free enterprise system, the dating of Homer's Odyssey, chronologies of Egyptian dynasties and Helladic cultures, and the histories of technology, economics, music, art and religion.