George Bass

As I walked to the Daly Science Center from Benson Memorial with a stomach full of ridiculously expensive cheap food, I expected the lecture of Dr. Bass to be more or less of a rehashing of what he spoke to our class about earlier in the day, albeit with a few more and older people watching. My first surprise came as I opened the door of lecture hall 206 and saw all the students sitting on the stairs. I myself was relegated to sitting at the very top of the stairs, near the door, with other students sitting on nearly every stair all the way down. As soon as I sat down I was immediately drawn into the lecture by Dr. Bass's immense passion and visible love for his field of work. My second surprise came as I listened to his tales of various escapades and adventures along the Turkish coast. The most impressive part of his lecture was his comfort in not only lecturing on the intellectual context of his work, but also his willingness to share his personal experiences with a large group of strangers. The longer I listened to Dr. Bass speak the more honored I felt to be in the presence of a true legend of archaeology. At first I did not understand why he included the slide and story about the beach where him and his wife spent their honeymoon forty years ago. However, towards the end of the lecture when he brought us back to that same beach, I was amazed that it has come to be known as "the beach where the American's were". You notice I say brought "us" because that is exactly what Dr. Bass did Monday evening. He brought us as an audience with him on his trips to the Near East and down to the sea floor to look for amphoras and scarabs in shipwrecks, which before his work nobody knew existed.

When he showed the slide of Queen Nefertiti's scarab I though no other find he has made could top it. However, upon further reflection I believe his discovery of the oldest "book", and glass were more historically significant items. In my humble opinion, Dr. Bass's most extraordinary finding was his work outside of the dive sites. His theories regarding contact and trade between Egypt and the Near East, Greece, and the Middle East in the Bronze Age have gone from mere speculation to widely accepted academic fact as a direct result of his research and writing. All of Doctor Bass's work that he shared while here at Santa Clara is very impressive to me, as I am sure it is for most of us. Putting