Michael Wood presents the second installment of his six-part series testing Homer's Iliad against the archaeological record, and this episode turns to a quieter battle: the one between German and American scholars over how to read the evidence at all. German historians, working in a tradition built on excavation, favor the physical remains at Troy itself, the fortification walls and burn layers Heinrich Schliemann and his successors dug out of the mound at Hisarlik. American historians lean harder on the written tradition, treating Homer's text and other ancient sources as the primary evidence to be tested rather than illustrated by the dig. Wood walks through both camps' reasoning, showing how the same set of facts, a fortified citadel, evidence of destruction, produces different conclusions depending on which discipline is doing the reading. The episode uses this split to raise a broader point about historical method: interpretation is never neutral, and the tools a historian trusts most shape the war they end up describing.