George F. Bass is the acknowledged father of underwater archeology. His excavations of shipwrecks around the world have revolutionized archeology and profoundly influenced our understanding of the earliest ages of civilization. He was a first-year doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania when he led his first undersea excavation. After only six diving lessons at his local YMCA, he directed the excavation of a Bronze Age shipwreck off the Turkish coast, the first ancient wreck to be excavated on the seabed by a diving archaeologist. Bass found a cargo of raw materials delivered great distances across the Mediterranean. This excavation and his subsequent discoveries demonstrated that there was active marine commerce in the Near East in the Bronze Age, centuries earlier than scholars had previously believed. In 1972, Dr. Bass founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA), now based at Texas A&M University, where he also founded the graduate program in nautical archaeology. The institute has since expanded its research to four continents. In 1984, his excavation of a ship sunk around 1300 B.C. with a cargo of raw materials -- ivory, glass, incense, ebony, tin, and ten tons of copper ingots -- as well as artifacts of Near Eastern manufacture, largely vindicated his theory of marine commerce in the Bronze Age. President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Science in 2002. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2003 Summit in Washington, D.C., Dr. Bass recounts his underwater excavations of sunken ships and presents a slideshow of the historic artifacts he has discovered.