Marija Gimbutas

Marija Gimbutas (Vilnius, Lithuania January 23, 1921 – Los Angeles February 2, 1994) researched the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological interpretation.

Life

Marija Gimbutas arrived in the United States as a refugee from Lithuania in 1949 after earning a PhD in archaeology in 1946 at Tübingen University in Germany, though she never forgot her Lithuanian heritage. She began immediately at Harvard University, translating Eastern European archaeological texts, and became a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. In 1955 she was made a Fellow of Harvard's Peabody Museum.

In 1956 Gimbutas introduced her "Kurgan hypothesis", which combined archaeological study of the distinctive "Kurgan" burial mounds with linguistics to unravel some problems in the study of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking peoples, whom she dubbed the "Kurgans"; namely, to account for their origin and to trace their migrations into Europe. This hypothesis, and the act of bridging the disciplines, has had a significant impact on Indo-European studies.

A professor of Archaeology at UCLA from 1963 to 1989, Marija Gimbutas directed major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeast Europe between 1967 and 1980. She unearthed an overwhelming number of art and daily life objects by digging to layers of earth representing a period of time before contemporary estimates for Neolithic habitation in Europe, and she researched and documented an enormous amount of archaeological findings through her career.

Work

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Gimbutas earned a reputation as a world-class specialist on the Indo-European Bronze Age as well as on Lithuanian folk art and the prehistory of the Balts and Slavs, partly summed up in the definitive Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe (1965). But she gained unexpected fame - or notoriety, for some - with her last three books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989)— which inspired an exhibition in Wiesbaden, 1993/94— and her final book The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), which presented an overview of her speculations about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion and the nature of literacy.

The book advanced what she saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess-centered and matriarchal ("gynocentric", or "gylanic"), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") cultural elements. According to her speculation, gynocentric / gylanic societies were peaceful; they honored homosexuals; and they espoused economic equality. The androcratic Kurgan peoples on the other hand invaded Europe and foisted upon its natives the hierarchical rule of warrior males.

In her work Gimbutas reinterpreted European prehistory in light of her backgrounds in linguistics, ethnology, and the history of religions and challenged many traditional assumptions about the beginnings of European civilization.

In doing so, however, Gimbutas made assertions of her own. Bernard Wailes, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, told Peter Steinfels in 1990 that she was "immensely knowledgable but not very good in critical analysis... She amasses all the data and then leaps to conclusions without any intervening argument... Most of us tend to say, oh my God, here goes Marija again". Other detractors quoted in that piece include Ruth Tringham, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley; and Linda Ellis. David Anthony, professor of anthropology at Hartwick College, denied that there was any evidence for a matriarchal society prior to the Kurgan incursion, and pointed out that Europe had hillforts and weapons, and presumably warfare, long before the Kurgan. Idyllic Theory of Goddess Creates Storm

Assessment

Joseph Campbell and Ashley Montagu each compared Marija Gimbutas' output to the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Campbell provided a foreword to a new edtition of Gimbutas' The Language of the Goddess (1989) before he died, and often said how profoundly he regretted that her research on the Neolithic cultures of Europe had not been available when he was writing The Masks of God. His papers are archived with Gimbutas' at the Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas library, on the campus of Pacifica Graduate Institute, just south of Santa Barbara, California.

Joan Marler wrote, "Although it is considered improper in mainstream archaeology to interpret the ideology of prehistoric societies, it became obvious to Marija that every aspect of Old European life expressed a sophisticated religious symbolism. She, therefore, devoted herself to an exhaustive study of Neolithic images and symbols to discover their social and mythological significance. To accomplish this it was necessary to widen the scope of descriptive archaeology to include linguistics, mythology, comparative religions and the study of historical records. She called this interdisciplinary approach 'archaeomythology'."

Her critics instance grave goods as characterizing more familiar Neolithic gender roles, which they allege Gimbutas did not account for, and question her emphasis on female figures when many male or asexual figures have also been found. Andrew Fleming "The Myth of the Mother Goddess," (World Archaeology 1969) denied that Neolithic spirals, circles, and dots were symbols for eyes; that eyes, faces, and genderless figures were symbols of a female; or that certain of Gimbutas' female figures were symbols of a goddess or goddesses. Peter Ucko [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/profiles/ucko.htm even speculated that Gimbutas' alleged fertility figures were in reality Neolithic dolls. Her attempts at deciphering Neolithic signs as ideograms, in The Language of the Goddess (1989), received the stiffest resistance in her field of all her speculations.

Influence on Neo-Pagan movement

Gimbutas' theories have been extended and embraced by a number of authors in the Neopagan movement, although her conclusions are generally considered speculative. Unlike some of her enthusiastic followers, Gimbutas did not identify the diverse and complex Paleolithic and Neolithic female representations she recognized as depicting a single universal Mother Goddess, but as a range of female deities: snake goddess, bee goddess, bird goddess, mountain goddess, Mistress of the Animals, etc., which were not necessarily ubiquitous throughout Europe.

In 2004, filmmaker Donna Read and Neopagan author and activist Starhawk released a collaborative documentary film about the life and work of Gimbutas, Signs Out of Time.

Works

Gimbutas, Marija 1946. Die Bestättung in Litauen in der vorgeschichtlichen Zeit. Tübingen: In Kommission bei J.C.B. Mohr.
Gimbutas, Marija: Ancient symbolism in Lithuanian folk art. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society , 1958. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society 49.
Gimbutas, Marija ,1961. "Notes on the chronology and expansion of the Pit-grave culture", in J. Bohm & S. J. De Laet (eds), L’Europe à la fin de 1’Age de la pierre: 193-200. Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Gimbutas, Marija 1963. The Balts. London : Thames and Hudson, Ancient peoples and places 33.
Gimbutas, Marija 1965. Bronze Age cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. The Hague/London: Mouton.
Colin Renfrew, Marija Gimbutas and Ernestine S. Elster 1986. Excavations at Sitagroi, a prehistoric village in northeast Greece. Vol. 1. Los Angeles : Institute of Archaeology, University of California, 1986, Monumenta archaeologica 13.
Marija Gimbutienė 1985. Baltai priešistoriniais laikais : etnogenezė, materialinė kultūra ir mitologija. Vilnius: Mokslas.
Gimbutas, Marija 1974. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe
Marija Gimbutas (ed.) 1976. Neolithic Macedonia as reflected by excavation at Anza, southeast Yugoslavia. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California, 1976. Monumenta archaeologica 1.
Marija Gimbutas 1977. "The first wave of Eurasian steppe pastoralists into Copper Age Europe", Journal of Indo-European Studies 5: 277-338.
Marija Gimbutas 1980. "The Kurgan wave #2 (c.3400-3200 BC) into Europe and the following transformation of culture", Journal of Indo-European Studies 8: 273-315.
Marija Gimbutas 1989. The Language of the Goddess.
Marija Gimbutas, Shan Winn, Daniel Shimabuku, 1989. "Achilleion: a Neolithic settlement in Thessaly, Greece, 6400-5600 B.C." Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Monumenta archaeologica 14.
Marija Gimbutas 1991. The Civilization of the Goddess
Gimbutas, Marija 1992. Die Ethnogenese der europäischen Indogermanen. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft , Vorträge und kleinere Schriften 54.
Dexter, Miriam Robbins and Karlene Jones-Bley 1997 (eds), The Kurgan culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe. Selected articles from 1952 to 1993 by M. Gimbutas. Journal of Indo-European Studies monograph 18, Washington DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
Gimbutas, Marija, edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter, 1999 The Living Goddesses. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Dexter, Miriam Robbins and Edgar C. Polomé, eds. 1997, "Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Marija Gimbutas." Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph #19. Washington, DC: The Institute for the Study of Man.

Sources

John Chapman 1998. "The impact of modern invasions and migrations on archaeological explanation. A biographical sketch of Marija Gimbutas." In M. Díaz-Andreu/M.-L. Stig Sørensen (eds.), Excavating Women (London:Unwin) pp 295-314.
A. Häusler 1995. "Über Archäologie und den Ursprung der Indogermanen." In M. Kuna/N. Venclová (eds), Whither archaeology? Papers in honour of Evzen Neustupny (Prague, Akademie) pp 211-229.

External links

Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library
Gimbutas biography, by her co-worker Joan Marler
"Learning the language of the Goddess" a 1992 interview with Gimbutas
Signs Out of Time documentary on the life of the late archaeologist Marija Gimbutas
Debunking Gimbutas' Mother Goddess theories: Peter Ucko's and Andrew Fleming's counterstances.
Kristina Berggren and James B. Harrod, "Understanding Marija Gimbutas": a response to criticism

1921 births | 1994 deaths | Lithuanian archaeologists | Women archaeologists

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