University of Pennsylvania Finding Aids

The Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Proto-History Project Collection includes budgets and proposals, reports and publications, financial records, artifact loans, field notes, artifact analysis, radiocarbon analysis, photographic prints and negatives, site plans and sections, and fourty-one pottery drawings. It is housed in 1 box and 2 oversized folders in Map Case M-20.

George Fletcher Bass, a pioneer in the field of Underwater Archaeology, was born in South Carolina in 1932. Planning to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather who were Professors of English, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University. A trip to Rome and the sight of the Roman antiquities altered Bass'life. After returning to Johns Hopkins, Bass spent two years at the School of Classical Studies in Athens followed by enrollment at Penn for his Ph.D. studies in classical archaeology. Bass was chosen in 1960 by Rodney Young, Professor and Chairman of Classical Archaeology at Penn and the Curator of the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum to direct the underwater excavation of a Bronze-Age shipwreck in Cape Gelidonya, Turkey. This event marked the beginnings of underwater archaeology as a discipline and as Bass'life's work. Bass conducted additional expeditions in Turkey at Yassi Ada, sponsored by the University Museum and the American Institute of Nautical Archaeology as well as the Thera Excavations sponsored by the Greek Department of Antiquities. Additional excavations were conducted in Italy at a Neolithic and Bronze Age site near Gravina di Puglia. Bass participated in or supervised additional work at Bodrum and Antolya, Turkey. In 1972, George Bass established the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and decided to make this organization the next step in his career. He became not only the founder but the director of the Institute which is now housed at Texas A&M University. The George F. Bass Underwater Archaeology papers are composed of twenty-seven boxes of correspondence, expedition records, photographs and drawings mainly from his work at Cape Gelidonya and Yassi Ada.

John Lambert Cotter is widely considered to have been a pioneer in American historical archaeology in a career. He began his career, that spanned some sixty-five years, studying and working in traditional prehistoric archaeology, earnestly beginning his explorations in historical archaeology in the 1950s. The textual records from Dr. John L. Cotter consist of 26 boxes of correspondence, teaching materials, archaeological field notes, reports, and publications.