Dr. Bass joined the university faculty as head of the Department of Anthropology in 1971 and served in that capacity until 1992. He additionally directed the university’s Forensic Anthropology Center and served as consultant to the Tennessee State Medical Examiners’ Systems, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the US Air Force Mortuary Services, and the US Armed Services Graves Registration Office. He retired in 1994.
His own research and training of forensic anthropologists gave him a national reputation, which was recognized by a host of awards and honors. The university honored him with an Alumni Public Service Award, a Distinguished Service Professorship, the Alexander Award for distinction as a teacher-scholar, and designation in 1985 as Macebearer. In 1985 he was nominated by UT and won the designation as Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. The Phi Kappa Phi named him an Academic Scholar in 1991, and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences named him a Distinguished Fellow in 1994. He authored nearly two hundred publications.
He founded the Anthropological Research Facility (Body Farm). Beginning with around three thousand skeletons of Plains Indians he had exhumed and brought with him from the University of Kansas in 1971, he amassed a large collection of donated and forensic skeletal remains used in teaching and research.
The work of Bass and his students on decay rates of human remains is central to Patricia Cornwall’s 1994 novel, The Body Farm. Bass’s contributions to the intellectual life of the university were recognized by the placement of a plaque in his honor on a faculty study. Bass donated his papers to the UT Libraries in 2014.
He and coauthor Jon Jefferson collaborated on a series of popular detective stories.