Stephen L. Zegura (2 July 1943–26 May 2019)

Stephen L. Zegura passed away on 26 May 2019 at the age of 75. Born in San Francisco, California, Zegura was the eldest child of Dragomir Božo Zegura and Adele (June) Perelli-Minetti. He earned his BA in anthropology, magna cum laude and with departmental honors, at Stanford University. Even as an undergraduate at Stanford, Zegura was extremely active, brainstorming creative ways to create an academic career focusing on the study of humans. His energetic appreciation for Stanford and the inspirational professors he met there was often shared with his students—he was a devoted Cardinal. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and received his master's degree and doctorate in human biology in 1971. His PhD research focused on multivariate analyses of variation in native Alaskan ("Eskimo") crania. Zegura relocated briefly to New York University before moving to the University of Arizona (U of A) in Tucson, where he stayed for the remainder of his career and life. For nearly 40 years Zegura taught biological anthropology, human evolution, and human genetics at U of A. He was the recipient of the 2009–2010 Raymond H. Thompson Award in honor of his distinguished service and contributions he made to the School of Anthropology throughout his career.

How do you measure the impact of a life, especially for someone as alive—as large as life—as Steve Zegura was? He was brilliant and tough and kind and generous. He was mischievous, with a slightly irreverent sense of humor. He was an extraordinary teacher, with a sharp intellect and a passion for sharing knowledge. And Zegura was an exceptional scholar, presenting theoretically rigorous and well-written contributions, with approximately 50 journal articles to his name. He leaves behind important contributions to knowledge in these research outputs, and here, we reflect on the arc of these outputs and their relevance then and now.

Zegura's first works focused on measuring skulls and applying statistical methods to differentiate them from one another and from other groups (Zegura 1971), a popular pastime in biological/physical anthropology since the discipline developed in the 1800s, and one that has deep links to racial science (Gould 1981; Sussman 2014) . Even at this early stage, Zegura displayed two traits that continued to shine throughout his research career: meticulous attention to detail and a creative ability to synthesize disparate methodologies into a coherent framework for hypothesis testing. While many skeletal biologists were continuing to use older, traditional methods to examine skeletal variation in human populations, Zegura was quick to include linguistic analyses in his studies,

Figure 1.

Stephen Zegura, early 1970s. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Chesney Zegura.

Figure 2.

Stephen Zegura (right) and Fred Hulse at the Arizona State Museum. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Chesney Zegura.

Figure 3.

Stephen Zegura's lasting impact as a scholar, teacher, and mentor: citation numbers at time of writing (23 September 2019).

examining degrees of correlation between these distinct data sets (Zegura 1975). This early work on Inuit populations led to numerous highly regarded publications. By integrating linguistics and skeletal biology, Zegura was ahead of the curve, and today this work is considered highly creative and synthetic. Zegura was also an early contributor to our understanding of inter- and intraobserver measurement error in craniometric studies and the importance of conducting baseline measurement error analyses in order to accurately interpret the biological significance of any results (Utermohle and Zegura 1982; Utermohle et al. 1983), a topic that still garners considerable attention (e.g., Robinson and Terhune 2017).

Ultimately, Zegura's interests turned to broader questions that highlighted the degree to which racial typology and theoretical approaches had limited the research focus of the study of prehistory in the North American Arctic (Schindler et al. 1985). In this, he was in keeping with the general movement away from typological "racial" thinking...