via reddit.com
Schliemann is a fascinating figure in the history of archaeology because he is simultaneously inspirational in terms of following your dreams and the lack of needing to fully bloom into who you’re meant to be before you’re middle aged and, like, one of the biggest clumsiest oafs of a field researcher
Because, yes, he took the approach that the Iliad and Odyssey had a historic basis and that Troy as a culture and city did exist at one time when the contemporary view of academic and armchair historians (which were incidentally basically the same thing at the time) was that Troy was a shared mythical idea between Greece and Rome and he put a lot of his own money towards the field work that led to the establishment of the fact that Troy did once exist.
But then there’s the fact that he basically plowed through the historic layers with destructive abandon – and I mean destructive by both casual and archaeological standards given that archaeology is inherently a destructive science but WE DONT USE FUCKING DYNAMITE FOR A REASON HEINRICH – and made wild assumptions which we now know to be at best tenuous and at worse outright false, like the fact that he assumed the historic Troy would be one of the lowest level of habitation at Hissarlik (Troy II) when in actuality it was almost certainly Troy VI or Troy VIIa (there were nine levels of habitation) as determined initially by his former co-excavation leader Frank Calvert – who could tell right off the bat that Troy II had pottery that was a couple centuries too early stylistically – and later by the double discovery of Mycenaean pottery in Troy VI and that the gold jewelry hoard that Schliemann and his second wife smuggled out of Turkey so she could wear it in public that he named Priam’s Treasure that was his primary justification for his identification of Troy II as the historic Troy of the Illiad was definitely Early Bronze Age.
Like, we all joke about how destructive and unprofessional fictional film archaeologists can be but at least they have the excuse of trying to get to the end goal before some villain group does. Schliemann legit thought “oh this is taking too long let me pack this excavation with GODDAMN DYNAMITE so we can get to the good shit”
If you think that’s bad, you should have seen what the palaeontologists were doing in those days.
Mooncustafer 