When Korfmann arrived at Troy he was puzzled to discover that the city's great gateways appeared to have no means of being secured shut. "The gate is open, inviting everyone to come in. We walked up and down a hundred times and wondered how it was closed, how it was blocked. How could they defend themselves?"I find this stuff more interesting than the Hollywood version. (Although that one may prove to be entertaining too.)He knew that if the gates couldn't be blocked, there must have been some other outer line of defences. His hunch was that there must have been more to Troy than had so far been uncovered.
He began to excavate outside the citadel walls and unearthed substantial buildings from the late Bronze Age, from between 1700 and 1200 bc. These were from the same time as the citadel that Dörpfeld had uncovered. Korfmann wondered if these buildings were the beginning of a lower city, a settlement that spread outside the citadel walls. But the area it might have covered was so vast that it would be impossible to excavate with shovels.
Korfmann asked his colleagues for a magnetic scan of the area: geophysics scans can detect changes in the Earth's magnetic field, revealing buried walls, streets and buildings.
In this case, the scans revealed a grid of wide streets and avenues beneath the fields outside the citadel walls. It was obvious that this belonged to a much later period than the late Bronze Age, to classical Greek and Roman times.
