Word: archaeologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That surreal image, which might have come from a Magritte painting, was how a young Turkish sponge diver from a small Mediterranean village described some curious objects he had spotted lying near a sunken shipwreck. When George Bass, a nautical archaeologist who had been rummaging around the floors of the Mediterranean coast for 25 years, heard that description in the summer of 1982, he thought-he hoped-that he might be on to something...
...mustachioed Bass, 52, who left the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 to found the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M University, is a kind of underwater Indiana Jones, a wet-suit archaeologist who searches out clues to the past on the ocean bottom. The uncovering of the wreck may prove a boon to the nascent but growing field of nautical archaeology, of which Bass is a founding father. Since 1960, Bass has not only adapted the traditional archaeological surveying techniques to the seabed but also contributed to key technological advances, like an underwater "telephone booth" to help divers...
...Archaeologists were intrigued by the potsherds, some of which have since been dated at 3500 B.C., and they soon discovered even more intriguing objects at Ban Chiang: bronze tools and jewelry, such as anklets and bracelets, fashioned between 2500 and 1500 B.C., and iron implements and ornaments made around 1000 to 500 B.C. Says University of Pennsylvania Archaeologist Joyce White: "Finding these metal objects was completely unexpected. It has caused scientists to rethink traditional theories about the development of civilization in Southeast Asia...
...movement, dominated by Ashkenazim, took to the streets of the capital to call for the retirement of former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, his supporters, mostly Sephardim, stormed the rally, screaming obscenities and tearing up placards. One demonstrator was killed. In explaining why he forsook a career as a distinguished archaeologist to enter politics, the late former Deputy Premier Yigael Yadin of the Likud coalition said, "I thought [the ethnic trouble] was the greatest danger to Israel, more than all the Arabs put together...
DIED. Yigael Yadin, 67, Israel's premier archaeologist and the epitome of that nation's citizen-soldier-politician tradition, who twice set aside his passion for the past, first to become a hero of the 1948 war of independence and Israeli chief of staff from 1949 to '52, later to serve as Deputy Prime Minister under Menachem Begin from 1977 to '81; of a heart attack; in Hadera, Israel. As operations chief...