George E. Mylonas

George Emmanuel Mylonas (Greek: Γεώργιος Μυλωνάς, romanized: Georgios Mylonas; December 21 [O.S. December 9] 1898, – April 15, 1988) was a Greek archaeologist of ancient Greece and Aegean prehistory. He is known for his numerous excavations, particularly at Olynthus, Eleusis and at Mycenae, where he made the first archaeological study and publication of Grave Circle B, the earliest known monumentalized burials at the site.

Mylonas was born in Smyrna, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and received an elite education. He enrolled in 1919 at the University of Athens to study classics, and joined the Greek Army, where he fought in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922. He witnessed the destruction of Smyrna in September 1922, and was subsequently taken prisoner; he was recaptured after a brief escape, but eventually secured money from American contacts to bribe his way to release in 1923.

In 1924, Mylonas began working for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, with which he retained a lifelong association. He became its first bursar the following year, and took part in excavations at Corinth, Nemea and Olynthus under its auspices. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Athens in 1927, he moved to Johns Hopkins University to study under David Moore Robinson, his excavation director from Olynthus. Mylonas received a second Ph.D. the following year, then held a teaching post at the University of Chicago until 1930. After a brief return to Greece, during which he taught at a gymnasium and made his first excavations at Eleusis, he was hired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1931, before moving to Washington University in St. Louis in 1933. He remained there for most of his career, becoming a full professor in 1938, serving as department chair between 1939 and 1964, and being promoted to distinguished professor in 1965.

Mylonas excavated and published widely, working at sites including Pylos, Artemision, Mekyberna, Polystylos and Aspropotamos. His approach to fundraising for his projects, involving intense engagement with the wealthier citizens of St. Louis and cultivation of the local press, has been characterized as both pioneering and highly successful. Along with John Papadimitriou, he was given responsibility for the excavation of Mycenae's Grave Circle B in the early 1950s, and from 1957 until 1985 excavated on the citadel of the site. His excavations helped to establish the chronological relationships between Mycenae's structures, which had been excavated piecemeal over the preceding century, and to determine the function of the site's Cult Center, to which he gave its name. He returned to Greece in 1969, where he was prominent in the Archaeological Society of Athens and in efforts to conserve the monuments of the Acropolis of Athens.

Mylonas received numerous honours and awards, including the Order of George I, the Royal Order of the Phoenix and the Gold Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America, of which he was the first foreign-born president. His work at Mycenae has been credited with bringing coherence to the previously scattered and sporadically-published record of excavation at the site. At the same time, his practice of arguing for correspondence between the archaeological record and ancient mythical traditions, particularly concerning the Trojan War and the Eleusinian Mysteries, was controversial in his day and has generally been discredited since.