George R. Milner


George R. Milner, Ph.D., is an archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. He has done extensive archaeological research on sites encompassing a wide range of time periods in Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Kentucky, and has also worked in Egypt and Saipan. He has worked with prehistoric and historic human skeletal remains from eastern North America, Denmark, and Egypt. By using modern samples of known age from the United States, Switzerland, and Portugal, he has helped refine skeletal age estimation techniques.

Background

George Milner grew up in northern Virginia and attended Beloit College in Wisconsin, graduating with a BA in 1975. He received his MA in 1976 from Northwestern University, and PhD in 1982.

Employment history

Currently Milner is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, where he has been employed since 1986. Earlier he worked on the FAI-270 Archaeological Project for the University of Illinois from 1978 to 1983, both as a Biological Anthropologist and an Archaeological Site Director. From 1983 to 1984, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1984 to 1986 he was the Director-Curator of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. While at The Pennsylvania State University, he was also Curator of the Anthropology Museum for several years.

Key excavations

Beginning as a student in 1971, Milner has participated on many archaeological surveys and excavations in Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. On the FAI-270 highway project, he directed major excavations at Julien, Turner-DeMange, Robinson’s Lake, and the East St. Louis Stone Quarry Cemetery. He has also studied many collections, including prehistoric and historic skeletons, from the United States, Denmark, Saipan, and Egypt.

Awards and honors

In 1975, he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1999 he received the Distinction in the Social Sciences for the College of Liberal Arts at The Pennsylvania State University. He has been a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2002.

Research emphases

Milner is best known for his work on the prehistory of eastern North America and especially on the Mississippian period in the Midwest. His research on Cahokia has shown that while the site is truly impressive, the sociopolitical system was less centralized and the area was not as heavily populated as once thought. Combining archaeological site and skeletal data, he has shown that conflict in prehistoric eastern North America, while it had a many thousand year history, varied considerably in intensity over time and space. Currently, he is working on methods to improve skeletal age estimation to refine paleodemographic estimates; one outcome of this work is that people in the past lived longer than is commonly thought.

Selected books and monographs