BY FRANK SPENCER

DURING THE COURSE OF his professional career, which DJ spanned the second and third quarters of the twentieth century, Harry Lionel Shapiro made a number of significant contributions to biological anthropology, most notably his inquiries into racial mixture and the role of the environment and geography in determining racial characteristics. He also contributed to the foundations of forensic anthropology in the United States and is further distinguished by being the first in an influential series of doctorates produced under the aegis of Earnest Albert Hooton (1887-1954) at Harvard between 1925 and the early 1950s, a generation that contributed significantly to the development of academic physical anthropology in the United States. Although his professional career unfolded in a museum context (namely, the American Museum of Natural History), Shapiro was nevertheless able, through an adjunct position at Columbia University, to play a modest, yet integral role in this important development after World War II. ¹

Harry was the second of three sons born to Rose (Clemens) and Jacob Shapiro, both Polish Jews, who emigrated sepa-