page_title: Wilhelm Dörpfeld
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Wilhelm Dörpfeld / Work
context_page_description: Wilhelm Dörpfeld was a German architect and archaeologist, a pioneer of stratigraphic excavation and precise graphical documentation of archaeological projects. He is famous for his work on Bronze Age sites around the Mediterranean, such as Tiryns and Hisarlik, where he continued Heinrich Schliemann's excavations. Like Schliemann, Dörpfeld was an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. While the details of his claims regarding locations mentioned in Homer's writings are not considered accurate by later archaeologists, his fundamental idea that they correspond to real places is accepted. Thus, his work greatly contributed to not only scientific techniques and study of these historically significant sites but also a renewed public interest in the culture and the mythology of Ancient Greece.
context_section_description: He developed a method of dating archaeological sites by the strata in which objects were found and the type of materials used for the buildings. He corrected many of Schliemann's previous conclusions, including the shaft burial sites at Mycenae. Dörpfeld realized that the site was a "tholos" tomb, not the "Treasury of Atreus", as Schliemann claimed. 
  During the Kavvadias's excavations, Dörpfeld was instrumental in correcting the previous belief that the temple of Athena, destroyed by the Persians in 480 BCE, was not beneath the Parthenon but to the north of it. He suggested the three different structures were built in the same place and spoke thus of Parthenon I, Parthenon II, and Parthenon III, applying the last term to the temple which is now there. Besides suggesting the existence of the two previous proto-Parthenons, he was able to reconstruct the dimensions of their ground plans.
  After Schliemann's death in 1890, his widow hired Dörpfeld to continue from where Schliemann had stopped in his excavations of Troy. Dörpfeld found nine separate cities, one atop the other, at the Hisarlik site. He argued that the sixth was the legendary Troy because it was larger than the first five cities and had high limestone walls, surrounding the city. Dörpfeld also found evidence for his claims in Mycenaean pottery, which he found in the same strata. Modern archaeologists, however, think that Homer wrote about Troy VII instead.
  Dörpfeld spent a lot of time and energy trying to prove that Homer's epics were based on historical facts. He proposed that the bay of Nidri, on the eastern coast of Lefkada, was Ithaca, home of Odysseus. Dörpfeld compared several passages from the Odyssey to the actual geographical location of Lefkada, and he concluded that it must be the Homeric Ithaca. He was especially convinced by the passage:
  I dwell in shining Ithaca. There is a mountain there,
  high Neriton, covered in forests. Many islands
  lie around it, very close to each other,
  Doulichion, Same, and wooded Zacynthos—
  but low-lying Ithaca is farthest out to sea,
  towards the sunset, and the others are apart, towards the dawn and sun.
  It is rough, but it raises good men." Homer, Odyssey 9.1:
  Lefkada is connected today to Mainland Greece by a causeway and floating bridge, but in ancient times, it was connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land, making it a peninsula rather than an island. The strip of land was cut through by the Corinthians in the 7th century BCE. Modern geographers and hydrographers, however, have claimed that ancient Lefkada was an island. They noted that the causeway that connects it to the mainland today is a recent product of silting in the channel and so Lefkada may have experienced varying degrees of connection with the mainland over the last few thousand years. Dörpfeld may have believed that Lefkada was a freestanding island (or was regarded as such) at the time of Homer’s descriptions, in accordance with the above passage. Dörpfeld may also have felt that the difficulty of crossing the narrow causeway was referred to in Homer's enigmatic and repeated jest, "For nowise, methinks, didst thou come hither on foot".Homer, Odyssey 14.190, 16.224. In 1912-1914, Dörpfeld obtained permission from the King of Greece to excavate the area of Kardaki Temple, because it was part of the King's vacation home of Mon Repos. Dörpfeld published his results in two brief notes without illustrations in the Archöologischer Anzeiger. He also excavated the Temple of Hera in Corfu.
caption: The "Treasury of Atreus" is the most impressive of the "tholos" tombs at Mycenae
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