Anna Sofaer

Anna Sofaer (born November 20, 1940) is a researcher and educator on the archaeoastronomy of the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest and other ancient cultures. In 1977, she "rediscovered" the astronomical marker site known as the Sun Dagger on Fajada Butte in Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Research has indicated this site records the solar and lunar cycles. In 1978, she founded the non-profit Solstice Project, through which she has produced a book of peer-reviewed research papers and two documentary, PBS broadcast films on Chaco Canyon. She continues to produce research and films from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the Solstice Project is based.

Sofaer was born on November 20, 1940 in Philadelphia, PA, where she grew up. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1962, where she met scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell. He became a research adviser when she founded the Solstice Project. Working previously in social planning, community organization, housing opportunity initiatives, and as an artist, she developed an interest in Maya astronomy, leading to her documentation of Southwestern pictographs and petroglyphs.

She married Michael Pertschuk in 1977.

In 1977 Sofaer visited Chaco Canyon as a volunteer recording ancient Southwestern American rock art. She chanced to record petroglyphs on Fajada Butte at what is now called the Sun Dagger or Three Slab site, now perhaps the most famous site in Chaco Canyon, located at a southeastern facing cliff near the top of Fajada Butte. The three large stone slabs leaning against the cliff channeled light and cast shadow so as to create light "dagger" markings on two spiral petroglyphs on the cliff wall. "We happened to get there near noon, a week from solstice, and a dagger of light was bisecting the spiral." Her research has since indicated this site to likely have been a calendrical shrine, marking the sun's varying heights at solstices and equinoxes, and the moon's rise over its 18.6 year standstill cycle.

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