On Marija Gimbutas

Born in 1921, the young Gimbutas travelled across Lithuania collecting traditional songs and folklore, which became the basis for her in-depth studies in linguistics, archeology, and ethnology. She even created a new science and research area of her own called “archeomythology” (1), (4).

At home and abroad, she turned into one of the most prominent and outstanding–but also co

ntroversial–female researchers of the 20th century in the Western world. World War II forced her family to emigrate in 1944, fleeing the Red Army. Two years later she received “a doctorate in archeology based on a dissertation Prehistoric Burial Rites in Lithuania“ (7). She stayed in Austria and Germany until 1950 when she moved to America.

Promoting interdisciplinary research Gimbutas elaborated “the theory of Old Europe” (8) based on the revolutionary idea that a 3,000 year civilization of the Goddess existed in Neolithic times: “a peaceful, egalitarian, matristic society” (7).

As Anija Miłuńska explains, the life-affirming female deity of regeneration Laima, from Lithuanian laimė meaning “happiness,” or “luck” (6), appears to protect the household: “she weaves the life, she is a spinner” (7).  Like a pagan Madonna,  she helps arrange marriages and weddings, protects pregnancy, and intervenes during labor “to pronounce each infant’s destiny” (2).

Then Marija continued her work at Harvard. Her book Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe was published in 1965. Later on, in The Prehistory of Eastern Europe, she presented the so-called Kurgan hypothesis she had been working on. According to Gimbutas, the cradle of the Indo-European culture were the steppes of Eurasia, where the Proto-Indo-Europeans domesticated the horse, making it possible to invade other regions. Gimbutas also looked into the genesis of Indo-European languages, “when goddesses were worshipped and societies were centered around women” (4).

Questioning the established theories, e.g. the dominant Anatolian hypothesis,  created a new challenge in academia just as Marie Skladowska-Curie had encountered, making it difficult for a woman to work “within a male-dominated field” (5). The Lithuanian-American is the author of three hundred publications and twenty books. She also directed archeological research in south-eastern Europe while at UCLA in Los Angeles, such as analyzing pieces of pottery and sculpture.

Gimbutas exposed the domination of the female form in ancient civilizations. Certain types appeared over and over, like naked female forms honouring the female creative power of giving life–in other words, the Goddess. In 1974 she published Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. The book promoted the Goddess and thereby undermined the established patriarchal stereotypes. Her theories were born out of an interdisciplinary approach: linguistics, ethnology, history of religion, mythology and archeology.

In the 1989 The Language of the Goddess,  she describes the symbols on ceramics, figurines, frescoes, cave paintings “throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic times and the Bronze Age” (3).  Deciphering the meaning of the symbols leads to a symbolic alphabet, which allows us to understand the cult of Goddess and its “cultural paradigm opposed to the patriarchal narrative” (7).

She continued to re-examine the civilization of Old Europe in the 1991 Civilization of the Goddess – The World of Old Europe (5). She revealed that the matristic society was, finally, conquered by a patriarchal society: “The Indo-European social structure is patriarchal, patrilineal and the psyche is warrior. Every God is also a warrior. The three main Indo-European Gods are the God of Shining Sky, the God of the Underworld and the Thunder God. The female goddesses are just brides, wives or maidens without any power, without any creativity” (7). These stereotypes are still found in the “battle of the sexes” and the constraints of deeply-entrenched cultural stereotypes on the basis of gender in our society today.

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Marija’s work also seeks answers to questions about the cultural and spiritual roots of Europe.  A number of her books are written for a wide audience, in a language more accessible than “the strictly scientific one” (8).

This prominent researcher passed away in 1994 in Los Angeles. She continued her work along “with her disciples” (9). Gimbutas who started her education at “the Aušra Girls’ Gymnasium in Kaunas” (9) overcame the regionalism and provincialism of the former Russian Empire with its various cultures to become a researcher of global significance, along with Marie Skladowska-Curie's herstory, controversial and largely criticized in academic circles, yet making a significant contribution to the cause of world feminism.

Dr Irena Kuzmina:

A multilingual researcher, teacher, writer, linguist and cultural enthusiast educated in Great Britain, France (La Sorbonne Nouvelle) and the Baltic States. Obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature at Versailles University, France, in 2005.

Cited Works:

1. https://www.archaeomythology.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Introduction-to-Journal-7.pdf?trk=public_post_comment-text

2. https://balticworlds.com/the-archaeologist-marija-gimbutas/

3. https://www.britannica.com/event/Stone-Age 

4. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gimbutas-marija-1921-1994

5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25002285

6. Laima | Goddess, Latvian, Baltic | Britannica https://share.google/q00RgbTtbMDOiEDaq 

7. https://marijagimbutas.pl/en/about-marija-gimbutas/

8. http://womenswell.org/marija.html

9. https://www.vdu.lt/en/person/marija-gimbutiene/