After 1883 he worked briefly as a teacher in Konstanz and Karlsruhe before taking a position as private tutor to the young sons of Romanian prince Alexander Bibescu.

On Mommsen's recommendation, Schuchhardt received a travel scholarship from the Imperial German Archaeological Institute, spending 1886-87 in Greece and Asia Minor, participating in the excavations of Pergamon under Carl Humann.

In 1892 he was asked by August von Oppermann to assume editorship of the monumental "Atlas of Prehistoric Fortifications in Lower Saxony", a work that would occupy Schuchhardt through 1916.

He held this post until his retirement in 1925, seeing the museum through the difficult period of World War I, the beginning economic depression in the early Weimar years, and the move to new quarters.

More controversially, he acquired a number of fossils and examples of Paleolithic art from the Dordogne region of France between 1910 and 1914 in association with Swiss archaeologist Otto Hauser, as well as the famous Craiova Hoard (a group of "Scythian" silver pieces) obtained under questionable circumstances while excavating in German-occupied Romania in 1917-1918.

Despite Schuchhardt's efforts at compromise and reconciliation, the increased politicization of archaeology and its allied fields during the Nazi period, unfortunately, did not contribute to any real accommodation between the two camps, even after Kossinna's death in 1931.

He was survived by his wife, Margarete (née Herwig, 1868-1949), two sons, classical archaeologist Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt (1900-1976), for many years a professor in Freiburg; and Wolfgang (1903-1993), and two daughters, Ewa Hebing-Schuchhardt (1897-1985) and Käthe (1901–1945).