What most of us know about Bronze Age Troy comes straight from Greek myth. As a setting for the epic Homeric poems starring Helen, Paris, Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector, among many others in a cast that includes both meddlesome gods and heroic mortals, Troy and its wooden horse – which may or may not have existed – endure as founding icons of Western civilization.
Because the Trojan War and all of its drama occurred in prehistory, Homer's Iliad, drawn from oral tradition and recorded centuries after the supposed events of the conflict, remains our primary window to ancient Troy.
But the Troy of myth was a real place, and during the past 140 years archaeologists have been slowly peeling away the mysteries of a place that was settled from 3000 B.C., the beginnings of the Bronze Age, to the Byzantine period and the 12 century A.D. Since Troy's rediscovery in the 1870s by German archaeologist and businessman Heinrich Schliemann, the ancient city has slowly come to life again through scientific discovery.
Work continues at the storied site today, and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of classics William Aylward, a veteran of 15 field seasons at Troy, will deliver a public lecture at the Wisconsin Science Festival on the new archaeology of Troy.
The lecture, which is a special edition of UW-Madison's Wednesday Night at the Lab, will be at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 29 at the H.F. DeLuca Forum in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. The event is free and open to the public.