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INA's Beginning and Early Days

by George F. Bass

INA began modestly. An institute devoted to nautical archaeology was created simply to provide the means for three former University of Pennsylvania graduate students – Frederick van Doorninck, Jr., Michael Katzev, and myself – to work more efficiently on ancient shipwrecks in the eastern Mediterranean. We had no idea that within a few decades our new institute would be excavating or surveying on four continents, with projects in Albania, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Canada, the Caymans, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Panama, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the Turks and Caicos, and in the United States from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico – nor that it would create an academic discipline with a university graduate program and several publication series.

How did all this happen?

In 1969 I was directing, according to the navy, the largest diving project in the world. No one else – not navy teams, oil drillers, salvage firms, nor oceanographic institutes – had twenty-five divers working twice a day at a depth of one hundred forty feet, six days a week, for months at a time, as we did at Yassi Ada, Turkey, for the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

By then I had directed the museum’s underwater program for a decade, largely as a graduate student. We had made thousands of decompression dives, launched the first commercially built research submersible in America, been the first to locate an ancient shipwreck with sonar, and designed and built new types of diving and underwater mapping equipment. Smaller underwater operations were run by large staffs. I was trying to do it alone. In fact, I was doing it in my spare time. As an associate professor of classical archaeology I was teaching, reading term papers, and advising on doctoral theses, normally without access to a secretary, which meant I usually typed my own correspondence.

Burned out, I decided to leave underwater archaeology at the end of the 1969 excavation campaign at Yassi Ada to lead a more normal life. I wanted to return to land archaeology, where Michael, Fred, and I had all started. The museum offered me the opportunity to direct the terrestrial excavation of a preclassical site in southern Italy in 1971.

The site was rich. We were finding new evidence for the arrival of the first domestic animals in the region. Yet, as I troweled through debris, the thought recurred: If these animals were introduced from the East, from the coasts of Greece or Yugoslavia, one of the boats that carried them must lie on the bottom of the Adriatic. That vessel, properly excavated, might answer more questions about immigration and new influences than a dozen similar land sites.

Perhaps I had made a mistake. Rather than leave underwater archaeology because of the problems, why not overcome the problems? The idea of a permanent center or institute of nautical archaeology began to jell, an institute with its own research vessel, its own crew, its own permanent staff of archaeologists, engineers, conservators, illustrators, and other specialists.

In March 1972 I read a statement to the board of managers of the University of Pennsylvania Museum proposing the establishment of a center devoted to marine archaeology as part of the museum. It did not ask the museum for financing; I would try to raise all necessary funds, even for my salary. Although the board enthusiastically accepted the principle of the institute, differences over the proposed institute’s structure remained unresolved. With no hard feelings, I realized that the formation of the institute as part of the museum would not solve the unique problems of underwater archaeology. A separate institute seemed the only solution.

In September 1972 I gave the University of Pennsylvania a year's notice of my resignation. Steven Gadon, my family lawyer, voluntarily incorporated the American Institute of Nautical Archaeology and obtained for it the proper status as a scientific/educational organization, which enabled it to receive tax-deductible gifts. For a new corporation, we had the required minimum of three people: I was president, Gadon was treasurer, and my wife Ann was secretary. 

An institute needs a staff. Michael and Susan Katzev, who had met at Yassi Ada, had moved to Cyprus to oversee the restoration of a fourth-century B.C. wreck they had excavated off Kyrenia. They were excited by the idea of the institute and agreed to join it.
 
But I soon learned that none of the major foundations that had supported my past work was willing to support the same work under the aegis of a new institute. Suddenly I felt very much alone. I had abandoned the security of a tenured professorship with the many benefits a university offers. If I could not succeed in putting the institute together by June, I would be looking for another line of work.

Then fortunes changed. Tulsa businessman and avid diver Jack Kelley called immediately after hearing from me, offering a three-year pledge of funds to the proposed institute, and agreeing to serve on its board of directors; his friend John Baird agreed to match his pledge. John Brown Cook, who supported the Katzevs’ work, made a five-year pledge. 

Besides Kelley, Baird, and Cook, retired Capt. W. F. (Bill) Searle, who had helped me when he was chief of U.S. Navy diving and salvage, agreed to sit on the board, along with Melvin Payne, president of the National Geographic Society. At our first board meeting, in early 1973 in Philadelphia, they were joined by Harry Kahn, a Philadelphia businessman and diver; my former student Betsy Whitehead, then secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America; and Fletcher Blanchard, Alan Boegehold, and G. Kenneth Sams, all academics from other universities.

The institute was a reality. Our first year’s budget was $50,000 – for everything! Ann and I sold almost everything we owned – house, car, furniture, even children’s toys – and moved with our two young sons to Cyprus to join the Katzevs. We took with us marine scientist John Gifford, who after working with us at Yassi Ada in 1969 had headed his own archaeological project in the Bahamas. He was so eager to help make AINA a success that he had worked without salary for months, simply living with Ann and me. Cynthia Jones Eiseman, another veteran of Yassi Ada, would stay in Philadelphia as a part-time executive director.

Michael Katzev left his teaching position at Oberlin College to serve as AINA vice-president. Fred van Doorninck, assistant director at Yassi Ada, hoped soon to leave the classics faculty at the University of California, Davis, to join us.

It was an ideal situation. As Ann settled on Cyprus, I spent three months living on Turkish fishing boats with John Gifford and a few volunteers successfully looking for ancient wrecks along the Turkish coast. Those we found at Sheytan Deresi, Serçe Liman?, and Bozburun kept institute archaeologists busy for years.

In 1974 AINA conducted its first field school, with ten tuition-paying scholars at Yassi Ada. But after only a few weeks our excavation was stopped. Civil war had broken out on Cyprus between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, leading to a Turkish invasion of the island and the closure of coastal archaeological activity in Turkey. The divided island of Cyprus was no longer practical as the headquarters for a new institute.

Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining. As tragic as was the war on Cyprus, it changed AINA forever, forcing us to expand our horizons. War refugees, Ann and I moved to Denver, Pennsylvania, to be near ship reconstructor Richard Steffy, who had joined AINA’s staff before we all left Cyprus, where he was reconstructing the Kyrenia ship. The Katzevs moved to Athens. I was urged by some to give up the institute, to return to teaching. Betsy Whitehead, however, suggested that  AINA might find a home at a university. She based this on her husband’s newly established Whitehead Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an arrangement whereby his medical institute retained independence, but shared staff and facilities with M.I.T. 

We did not know how to shop for a university home, but word spread and soon we were approached by a number of universities. Just before signing a contract with a prominent East Coast university, I received a conference call from Texas A&M University, which asked me to visit College Station. The offer made to me there was overwhelming. If AINA would affiliate with Texas A&M, the university would establish a graduate program of nautical archaeology with its own budget and secretaries. We could set our own student admissions standards and degree requirements, and could hire our own faculty. AINA would continue to fund projects. The original faculty would be Dick Steffy, Fred van Doorninck, and myself; we would each work for the university for a term and for AINA for a term, with the university paying summer salaries since we would be taking students into the field on AINA projects. We were told that we could add a New World archaeologist the second year, and we later chose Dr. Donny Hamilton, who was conserving remains of the Spanish 1554 Fleet excavated off Padre Island, Texas.

The staff of AINA was also expanding with the addition of American Donald Frey, Englishman Robin Piercy, and Turk Tufan Turanli. 

To reflect the international nature of its growing staff and board of directors, we shortened the institute’s name to simply the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

The university affiliation was perfect, with INA serving as the field arm and Texas A&M as the academic arm of a mutually beneficial arrangement.

What have been some of INA’s accomplishments?

There has been no more important an excavation in the field of historical archaeology during the past half century than that conducted at Port Royal, Jamaica, the richest English colony in the New World, sunk beneath the waves in 1692 by an earthquake that submerged houses, inns, shops, and their uniquely preserved contents. That excavation, alone, is more than similar institutes might have hoped to accomplish.

There has been no more important a preclassical Mediterranean site excavated in recent decades than the Uluburun shipwreck in Turkey, with its 18,000 artifacts from nearly a dozen different cultures, twenty tons in all, precisely dated to within a few years of 1300 B.C. by dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. This site is revolutionizing our picture of the Late Bronze Age -- the time of the Trojan War, King Tut, and the Exodus. Its excavation, alone, would justify the existence of an archaeological institute.

There has been no more important a medieval site excavated in the past half century than the Serçe Liman shipwreck in Turkey, with the largest collection of medieval Islamic glass in the world, the largest collections of Byzantine tools and weapons, the earliest dated chess set, and much more, all dated almost exactly to the year 1025 by inscribed objects on board. The curator of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has written that this excavation, alone, has revolutionized the study of medieval Islamic art.
 
INA researchers have written the definitive history of Lake Champlain, excavated the oldest shipwreck ever found in the New World, excavated the oldest ship ever found in the Old World, were the first to excavate shipwrecks of the American Revolution – both American and British –, excavated a Civil War blockade runner in Texas, have pioneered shipwreck archaeology in East Africa, from Egypt to Kenya through Eritrea, and given the world its first chance to see the cargo of a classical Greek ship that sailed across Homer's wine-dark sea!

INA archaeologists directed the first underwater excavation to use saturation diving, in Italy, and set a record for any underwater project undertaken with compressed-air equipment with their 22,5000 dives to between 145 and 200 feet at Uluburun, Turkey. INA researchers/Texas A&M faculty have made the university a world center for the conservation of underwater archaeological finds, as shown by its current conservation of La Salle's ship La Belle. Artifacts excavated in Turkey are conserved in a modern laboratory that is part of an INA campus in Bodrum with office building, library, and dormitory. Adjacent to the campus, Fred and I, both now retired, built our own houses, along with those of Tufan and Cemal Pulak, director at Uluburun and now one of seven nautical archaeology faculty at Texas A&M; all seven hold endowments given mostly by INA directors and patrons to Texas A&M, which matched them.

By affiliating with Texas A&M University, INA advanced the field of underwater archaeology not only in the United States, by training future academics, museum curators, and state, federal, and contract underwater archaeologists, but around the world, by training students from Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

In return for the financial aid provided by Texas A&M, INA's many appearances on all the major television networks, its several one-hour specials on Public Television, and its articles in National Geographic and other popular magazines around the world have all added to the university's positive image to an immense audience.

In order to disseminate the results of its research in scholarly and popular form, INA began several publications series: The Ed Rachal Foundation Nautical Archaeology Series (Texas A&M Press) for major excavation reports; Studies in Nautical Archaeology (Texas A&M Press in the U.S. and Chatham Publishing in the U.K.) for slimmer works, including those written by graduate students as M.A. theses; INA Reports in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, and the INA Quarterly (formerly INA Newsletter), now joined by the INA Annual. It is been especially heartening to see how young scholars develop a habit for publishing quickly by writing for INA periodicals and soon move on to writing books for national and international publishers. The hundreds of  publications written by INA archaeologists leave a magnificent record for future generations.

And INA is still young!