Olga Soffer

Olga Aleksandrovna Soffer (née Shabunin; 9 September 1942 – 20 June 2026) was an American anthropologist. She was a department store events co-ordinator, who went on to become professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her specialist discipline was Paleolithic archaeology, with a particular interest on clothing and the role of prehistoric women. Soffer was keen to correct the idea that stone-age men went out hunting on their own, instead her analysis showed it as a more communal endeavour that included women, children and elders.

Early years Olga Soffer was born into a White Russian emigré family in Belgrade, German occupied Serbia, in 1942. She was the daughter of Alexander and Galinda (née Girs) Shabunin, who had been displaced from the Crimea after the defeat of the White Russian movement in the civil war of 1921. Soffer spent part of her childhood in a Nazi labour camp in Serbia. After the war her family were expelled from the newly communist Yugoslavia, and spent 1951 to 1955 in a camp for displaced people in Risiera di San Sabba, near Trieste, before emigrating to the United States in September 1955. She went to Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, and then got a political science degree at Hunter College in 1965.