"Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away." ― Homer, The IliadThe city-state of Troy is the stuff of legends, with mythical heroes, women of unsurpassed beauty and the fabled wooden Trojan Horse. Now a cross-disciplinary team of scientists will begin a new excavation project in 2013.
University of Wisconsin-Madison classics Professor William Aylward will lead the expedition. Aylward is an archaeologist with a long history of experience digging in the ruins of the classical world, including in Troy itself. The new excavation project, which will be a series of summer-time expeditions, will be an international collaboration with many organizations, conducted under the auspices and in cooperation with Turkey's Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, which is close to the site of Troy.
"Troy is a touchstone of Western civilization," says Aylward. "Although the site has been excavated in the past, there is much yet to be discovered. Our plan is to extend work to unexplored areas of the site and to systematically employ new technologies to extract even more information about the people who lived here thousands of years ago."