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Quite a while ago, Heinrich Schliemann read Homer's Iliad, and thought that it was a historic account of the events of the trojan war.
He then went on to develop the basis for a number of methods that are at the core of modern archaeology so that he could use the Iliad to find the location of the ancient city of Troy. These include historical reconstruction of original documents from multiple copies, the use of the content of stories to help guide the search for evidence, and the tying in of contemporary old maps to the stories to try and locate the sites where the events took place. This is viewed by many as some of the best examples of archaeology that have ever been done.
Eventially, he was sucessfull, and deserves full credit for the development of the techniques that he used to find troy. Unfortunately, this was done in the days of the archaeologist as treasure hunter, rather than using the modern model of the archaeologist as a scientist trying to rediscover history. This lead him to destroy the evidence of some of the history of seven later cities that had been built on top of troy, as they were too young to be the city that he was looking for. This is viewed by many as some of the worst examples of archaeology that have ever been done.
See also Zyra's history page.