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German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann (shown here), director of excavations at Troy, confronts his harshest critic, ancient historian Frank Kolb (see photo of Frank Kolb), at a conference in Tübingen, Germany, last February. Since 1988 Korfmann has dug at the mound of Hisarlik, in northwestern Turkey, which has been identified as ancient Troy since the excavations there by Heinrich Schliemann (see photo of Heinrich Schliemann) in the 1870s. Korfmann describes Late Bronze Age Troy (Troy VI)—the most likely candidate for Homer’s Troy—as a prosperous trading center connecting the Black Sea with the Aegean. Kolb, however, counters that Korfmann’s evidence shows no such thing—Troy was just a country estate, not the magnificent city described in Homer’s Iliad. So heated were the debates at the Tübingen conference that members of the audience actually came to blows.