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Amateur archaeologist

Heinrich Schliemann was an amateur archaeologist. He was obsessed with the stories of Homer and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. He dedicated the second part of his life to unveiling the actual physical remains of the cities of Homer's epic tales. Many refer to him as the "father of pre-Hellenistic archaeology".

In 1868, Schliemann visited sites in the Greek world, published his second book Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he described ancient sites in Greece and the Ottoman Empire and asserted that Hissarlik was the site of Troy. He submitted this book as a dissertation to the University of Rostock. In 1869, he was awarded a PhD in absentia from the university for that submission. David Traill wrote that the examiners gave him his PhD on the basis of his topographical analyses of Ithaca, which were in part simply translations of another author's work or drawn from poetic descriptions by the same author. Other researchers who worked with documents from the university archives clearly contradict Traill's statements.

Schliemann was a honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of London and elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1880.