schliemann is an easy pull, everyone hates him, tell us about a niche historical archaeologist/'archaeologist' you have one-sided beef with. 👀 i love learning who other people in my discipline would get into a all-out brawl with.
You know what, that's a really good point. Honestly, there are a lot of people that are easy to rag on, so I kind of want to flip your question on its head a little bit and talk about Lewis Binford.
Most archaeologists dislike Binford, myself included. Part of that was because he was an asshole misogynist, and there's no excuse for that. The other part is for a lot of the assumptions he made in his work, and you can check out a really good post by @archaeologistproblems on that here.
But everyone deserves a good dose of cultural relativism, even Binford. I'm not trying to justify any of the problematic things that he said/did, but when you view them in the context of his life, they become more understandable. Here's a wikipedia article with some background.
When you learn that he got into archaeology through the military in WWII, his general mindset starts to make a little more sense. Binford was very much a product of his time, and it's important to keep that in mind. He was absolutely an asshole, and a lot of his processual methodology is flawed, but that over scientific approach was a direct response to the culture history theory that he was surrounded by at the beginning of his career.
We need to thoroughly understand our history in order to learn from it, and railing away at Binford without understanding why he was the was he was (except for the misogyny, which is never cool) doesn't do a lot for moving us forward.
