Feature writing

Observing the marks left by textiles on ice age pots, the fashion executive turned academic refocused science’s view of prehistoric society.

One of Alex Beattie’s earliest memories, aged three or four, is of accompanying her mother, the archaeologist Olga Soffer, on a dig in France. Later, as a teenager struggling to describe her mother’s profession to friends, Beattie recalled, “the Indiana Jones movies came out, and I could say, ‘Yes, that’s what my mom does’”.

Soffer, who has died aged 83 at her Los Angeles home, made history through her research. Her discoveries revealed not only what ice age people wore but how they lived and the important, previously obscured roles of women.

In the late 1990s, examining clay fragments from upper Paleolithic sites in Moravia and Russia with her friend and collaborator James Adovasio, Soffer discovered the impressions of woven textiles pressed into clay more than 27,000 years ago.

“The find pushed back the known history of textile production by thousands of years and upended the standard reconstruction of ice age life, in which men were imagined hunting mammoths while women waited behind,” the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign noted in its obituary of Soffer, who was a professor of anthropology there from 1985 until her retirement in 2008.

Soffer and her colleagues’ research revealed that it was “far more likely that men, women, children and elders all contributed to the work of communal life, tossing immense nets, probably woven by women”, in order to capture food prey.

“If the public should understand one thing about prehistory,” Soffer said, “it is that the past was peopled not only by prehistoric men, but also by prehistoric women.”

Soffer, Adovasio and their colleague David Hyland observed that many of the Venus figurines – female statuettes long read as fertility symbols – were wearing hats, snoods, bandeaus, sashes and belts. The trio concluded that men, women, children and elders all contributed to communal life in Paleolithic society.

Their findings were published in a 2000 paper, The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Paleolithic – which received much media attention – and in Soffer’s 2007 book The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, co-authored with Adovasio and Jake Page.

Beattie said her mother was dismissive of fame: “She was driven by an insatiable passion for learning and discovery. She found fulfilment in walking her career path and supporting others.”

Soffer was born Olga Aleksandrovna Shabunin on 9 September 1942, in Belgrade, which at the time was the capital of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. The only child of Alexander Shabunin, a Russian-born businessman, and Galina (Girs) Shabunin, she and her parents were sent to a labour camp.

Soffer later recalled that she was said to have looked like the daughter of the camp commander and he would sometimes take her to the officers’ mess to give her extra food. “Imagine how terrified my grandparents would have been,” Beattie said. “They had no choice but to let him take her. But they were also happy she was getting food and warmth.”

In 1955, Soffer and her parents immigrated to the US, where, having settled in Brooklyn, her father assembled window blinds and her mother was a seamstress. “My mother was a learning sponge,” Beattie said. “She learned English through Latin, and also spoke Russian, Ukrainian, Yugoslavian, Italian and a little French.”

After earning a degree in political science at Hunter College, Soffer became a special events coordinator for the department store chain Abraham & Straus. There she met her lifelong friend, the Hollywood agent Marcia Hurwitz. “I was 10 years Olga’s junior,” Hurwitz said. “I once asked why she had mentored me. ‘I knew you wanted more,’ she said. So did she. We both came from not-much and made successes of ourselves.” Soffer tenderly called Hurwitz her “first unborn”.

In her early 30s, Soffer became bored with work and attended graduate school at Hunter. Courses in art history led to an interest in paleoanthropology and ethnography. She received a master’s degree in anthropology in 1975, then taught at Hunter, Lehman College, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Illinois, where, after retiring, Soffer became professor emerita.

“My mother came from nothing, yet created this amazing life,” Beattie said.

“Olga was very humble,” Hurwitz recalled. “It’s an immigrant’s humility: she didn’t like to draw attention to herself. I was awestruck by her traipsing around the world, collecting woolly mammoths. She never talked about it, but she was very proud of her work. She knew if she’d been a man she would’ve gotten more attention. She was a woman in a man’s world in a different time.”

Beattie added: “I never heard my mother describe herself as a feminist. She was very matter-of-fact. Being in a male-dominated field was her normal. She just got on with it. She once said, ‘You don’t quibble with someone who works in sites with 1,000 dead mammoths’.”

Soffer married twice, first in 1962 to Beattie’s father, teacher Mark Soffer. Her second marriage in 1979 to poet Dmitry Bobyshev ended in 1991. After retiring, Soffer doted on her family (including Beattie’s children, Mena, 20, and Jake, 17) and friends, cooking Sunday suppers and special meals on Christmas Eve – always boeuf bourguignon and potatoes fried in duck fat – and Russian Christmas.

“She loved spending time with Mena and Jake,” recalled Hurwitz. “She’d cook with them, take them out. She loved going to LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art] and the Russian food market. She looked great, loved fashion. I miss her terribly.”

“Nobody knew a cooler new play, gallery opening, or restaurant before my mom did,” said Beattie. “She was living her life to the last moment. That’s the example she left.”

Asked what Soffer would have made of the attention around her death, Beattie laughed softly. “She would say, ‘Wrap it up. Too much already.’”

Olga Soffer, anthropologist, born on 9 September 1942, died on 20 June 2026, aged 83