George Milner

ost@psu.edu

George R. Milner is a Distinguished Professor in the Anthropology Department at The Pennsylvania State University. He holds degrees from Beloit College (B.A., 1975) and Northwestern University (M.A., 1976; PhD, 1982), and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (1983-4). Before arriving at Penn State in 1986, he was Director of the University of Kentucky’s Museum of Anthropology and, earlier, the Bioarchaeologist and a Site Director on one of the largest Cultural Resource Management projects ever undertaken in the United States (FAI-270 Project). He was inducted to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.

Dr. Milner has two areas of research specialization: human osteology and the prehistory of eastern North America. He has participated in the excavation of sites in the eastern United States, Egypt, and Micronesia, and has been engaged in the analysis of archaeological materials from those areas as well as skeletons from Denmark. Throughout his career he has worked to integrate osteological and archaeological research to better characterize living conditions in distant times. Much of his osteological research is designed to further our understanding of the health of past peoples, its relationship to various social and natural conditions, and how it changed over time. Turning to archaeological research, his work focuses on population-related issues and human responses to local environmental settings.

There are forensic as well as archaeological dimensions to his skeletal research. Currently he is involved in refining procedures to estimate the ages of adult skeletons, which involves examinations of many hundreds of known-age modern skeletons from around the world. Dr. Milner’s publications include books, journal articles, and book chapters on archaeological and osteological topics. Among them are The Cahokia Chiefdom (1998) and The Moundbuilders (2004), which was written to increase public awareness of the rich archaeological heritage of eastern North America. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was the past President of the Paleopathology Association and the Midwest Archaeological Conference.