Mark Holley is from Ovid, a small village in central Michigan which contains more cattle than people. At the tender age of eight he saw a movie entitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark and decided that archaeology was the life for him. In 1991 he received a B.A. from the University of Michigan and, shortly thereafter, moved from the USA and successfully completed a Ph.D. in Underwater Archaeology at Edinburgh University.
In 1998 he was appointed as a research associate by the Center for Maritime and Underwater Cultural Resource Management at Michigan State University and co-opted to the Governors (of the state of Michigan) Board for Historic Shipwrecks.