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.
“The transition from one career in fashion promotion to another in archaeology did take some time, but it was never boring,” she wrote in an autobiography she produced for family and friends.
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, Alex Beattie, who did not provide a cause.
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. “She really changed the complexion of the field. This is a giant loss in archaeology and anthropology.”
Professor Soffer’s breakthrough discovery came in the 1990s, as she sifted through thousands of fired-clay fragments, dating back more than 26,000 years, 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, and Professor Adovasio went “absolutely ballistic,” she told The New York Times in 1995.
Her hunch had been correct.
Standing in her kitchen, 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).
There was also evidence of woven baskets and nets used in hunting.
Intrigued, Professor Soffer decided to reanalyze Venus figurines found in Europe, searching for evidence of clothing that might have been missed in previous studies (which had largely been conducted by men, she liked to note).
Sure enough, she and her collaborators found carved details depicting caps, skirts, belts and garments worn across the chest.
Because women were the primary crafters in subsequent societies, Professor Soffer concluded that they had probably played the same role in prehistoric times.
“Women were not just out there to reproduce,” 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.”
What’s more, the nets probably gave women the ability to help with hunting, especially for small animals like rabbits.
“Life was lived by more than stone spear point,” she told The Times in 2012. “It gets us away from the Hemingway, mega-macho male stuff.”
Olga Aleksandrovna Shabunin was born on Sept. 9, 1942, in Belgrade, the capital of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. Her father, Alexander Shabunin, was a Canadian immigrant who owned rental properties; her mother, Galina (Girs) Shabunin, was an administrative assistant.
The sound of explosions echoed throughout Olga’s childhood. The family’s house, she later wrote, “was some five blocks from the old Belgrade Main Railway Station — a location that was repeatedly bombed during the war, first by the Axis powers, then by the Allied ones.”
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.
“My grandmother used to tell me that being incredibly blonde and Aryan looking, I was a big hit with the commander of the camp, whose daughter back home in Germany I ostensibly resembled,” she wrote. “He would, Grandma told me, often come to take me to the officers’ mess hall at dinner time for some decent food and warmth.”
Back in Belgrade, her father lost his Canadian citizenship and was jailed. He was released when the war ended.
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.
“What followed,” she wrote, “were years in a fun and glamorous job where I discovered and promoted fashion trends and devised all possible ways of using fashion to lure customers into the store.”
Eventually, feeling restless, she enrolled in graduate school at Hunter, taking courses in art history at night. Gradually, she drifted toward paleoanthropology and ethnography, immersing herself in other times and cultures.
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.
At first, the career change baffled her friends.
“It was like, ‘Wait, you’re doing what?’” Marcia Hurwitz, an Abraham & Straus colleague and lifelong friend who became a Hollywood agent, said in an interview. “But ultimately it made sense. She wanted more in life — we all did. She was always way more evolved than being in fashion.”
Professor Soffer taught at Hunter, Lehman College and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before joining the University of Illinois in 1985.
Before turning to prehistoric fashion, she excavated sites in Russia and Ukraine — a difficult undertaking for someone from the United States, especially a woman.
“She had to work with older Soviet men who were really dominant in the field,” Professor Petraglia said. “It takes a really special, determined person to do that. She was pretty amazing.”
Her marriage to Mark Soffer, a high school history teacher, ended in divorce in 1979. She married Dmitry V. Bobyshev, a poet and translator, the same year; they divorced in 1991.
In addition to Ms. Beattie, her daughter from her first marriage, she is survived by two grandchildren.
Professor Soffer’s research was widely (and amusingly) covered in the media.
“Furs for Evening, But Cloth Was the Stone Age Standby,” a 1999 Times headline read.
Introducing a segment on Professor Soffer, the “Nightline” host Chris Bury said, “Tonight, the real caveman couture.”
Even she had some fun with it.
“That skirt is to die for,” Professor Soffer told The Times, describing a little number she discovered on a Venus figurine. “Though maybe it’s an acquired taste.’‘
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