Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: University of Illinois.
A fashion designer turned archaeologist. the late Olga Soffer co-wrote The Invisible Sex.

Some of the best stories at the New York Times are in the obituaries, especially since the paper began making an effort to include women and minorities they had once neglected.

Michael S. Rosenwals wrote, “Back in the heyday of department stores, Olga Soffer stood at the center of the action.

“As special events coordinator for Abraham & Straus, a shopping mecca on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Ms. Soffer organized fashion shows, cooking festivals and other programs to reel in customers.

“She loved her job, but after more than a decade it began to feel more tedious than chic. ‘I stopped caring,’ she later wrote, ‘if it was navy blue or dark brown socks that were the next hot item.’

“So she went to graduate school, became an archaeologist and wound up embarking on a primitive second act in fashion, unearthing startling revelations about ice age clothing and the role that women played in prehistoric textile production. …

“Professor Soffer died on June 20 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 83. Her death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed by her daughter. …

“Becoming one of the world’s top experts on the Upper Paleolithic period, Professor Soffer helped establish that the wardrobes of ice age people weren’t limited to animal hides, as had been previously thought. Her research showed that they had produced woven cloth, string skirts and caps — among other necessities, including belts, nets and baskets — thousands of years earlier than scholars believed.

“ ‘She made the invisible visible,’ Michael Petraglia, a professor of archaeology and human evolution at Griffith University in Australia, said in an interview. …

“Professor Soffer’s breakthrough discovery came in the 1990s, as she sifted through thousands of fired-clay fragments … that had been excavated from settlements in what is now Czechia.

“Under magnification, she noticed faint parallel lines in the fragments. She photographed them, writing, ‘plant fibers?’ in her notebook, the lines having tantalizingly suggested the production of textiles. …

“Several years later, James M. Adovasio, an expert on ancient fiber technologies at Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania, visited her at home in Illinois. She projected slides of the fragments on her refrigerator door. … Professor Adovasio told her ‘that the lines were the impressions of textiles, making them by far the earliest such artifacts,’ as he, Professor Soffer and Jake Page wrote in The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory (2007). …

‘Women were not just out there to reproduce,i she told Scientific American in 2000.

“ ‘They were actively involved in production as well, just as women are in any and all societies that we know of.’ …

“Olga Aleksandrovna Shabunin was born on Sept. 9, 1942, in Belgrade, the capital of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. … When she was an infant, her parents sent her to live with her maternal grandparents in Veliki Beckerek (now Zrenjanin), a rural city about 50 miles north of Belgrade. Soon after she arrived, the Nazis captured the city and sent them to a labor camp. …

“In 1955, the family immigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, where Olga’s father assembled window blinds and her mother worked as a seamstress.

“After high school, Olga enrolled at Hunter College in Manhattan, majoring in political science. She graduated in 1965, and her first job was with Abraham & Straus. …

“She received a master’s degree in anthropology in 1975 and then entered a doctoral program at the City University of New York. She wrote her dissertation on the prehistoric archaeology of Eastern Europe.”

More at the Times, here.