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Ann Singletary Bass

When Ann Singletary married George Bass in 1960, she had only vague, romantic notions of what archaeologists do, and no notion at all of how they live while they are doing it. Thus, when she followed George to Turkey several months after the briefest of honeymoons, she brought with her a new master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music and two suitcases, one of clothes and one of music. The music stayed in the suitcase while she spent the next three months on the narrow Gelidonya beach, surrounded by cliffs, learning to love beans and rice, enjoying communal living by the sea with the multi-national team. 

A workaholic like George, she says she could not have enjoyed summer excavations without something to do, so by 1961 she was up every morning at 4:30 to fetch bread from the Bodrum bakery before cooking breakfast for the entire staff, who sailed daily to the Yassi Ada wreck site. The rest of the day she spent cleaning and cataloging retrieved artifacts, taking care of expedition correspondence, and keeping the expedition’s financial books. This continued through many summers in the field, leading eventually to a full year in Bodrum searching for joins among the Serçe Limanı wreck glass shards, the million-piece jigsaw puzzle. She did not apply for teaching positions in those early years because she never knew if she would be back in the U.S. in September or in December, but instead took temporary jobs to pay for her annual passage to Turkey, until eventually joining the music faculty at the Baldwin School outside of Philadelphia.

Motherhood did not slow her travels. In 1968 she took year-and-a-half-old Gordon to the Greek island of Santorini for the summer, and the following year to a camp on desolate and rocky Yassi Ada. In 1971 she was at Gravina di Puglia in southern Italy with both Gordon and year-and-a-half-old Alan.

A corporation in Pennsylvania needs three members, so in 1972, when George decided to leave the University of Pennsylvania to found INA, Ann became a founding director. The following year she and George sold almost all their possessions – house, furniture, car, even the boys’ toys – to start a new life on the island of Cyprus, where Michael and Susan Katzev already owned a home. After finding a house to rent in Nicosia, George left for a three-month survey off the Turkish coast while Ann located schools for the boys, settled in, and bought a secondhand car, learning to drive on the left and shift gears in heavy Nicosia traffic all at the same time.

When war broke out on Cyprus just a year later, the Basses, war refugees, moved first to Denver, Pennsylvania, for a year, to be near Dick Steffy, another early member of INA, then to England for a year, and finally to College Station, when INA affiliated with Texas A&M University. Gordon and Alan had by then been to three different schools in three different countries, usually arriving well after the fall term had started, but somehow thrived.

During the remainder of Gordon and Alan’s school years, in College Station, Ann taught piano and served as accompanist for instrumentalists and choral groups. In the 1990s she and George built a house next to INA’s Bodrum Research Center and began dividing their time almost equally between Texas and Turkey.

Now Ann knows exactly how archaeologists live in the field, and says her early romantic notions about it were absolutely dead on, give or take a few challenges along the way!