Marija Gimbutas () (
Vilnius,
January 23,
1921 –
Los Angeles,
United States February 2,
1994), was a Lithuanian-American
archeologist known for her research into 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, but earned a mixed reception by other professionals.
Early life
Gimbutas was born as Marija Birutė Alseikaitė to Veronika Janulaitytė-Alseikienė and Danielius Alseika in
Vilnius, the capital of
Lithuania. Her parents were members of the Lithuanian
intelligentsia, a
social class which rose from the farming class during imperial Russian rule.
[.] Her mother received
doctorate in
ophthalmology at the
University of Berlin in 1908 and became the first female physician in Lithuania, while her father had received his
medical degree from the
University of Tartu in 1910. After the 1917
Russian Revolution, Gimbutas' parents had founded the first Lithuanian hospital in the capital.
During this period, her father also served as the publisher of the newspaper
Vilniaus Žodis and the cultural magazine
Vilniaus Šviesa and was an outspoken proponent of Lithuanian independence during the
war against Poland. Gimbutas' parents were
connoisseurs of traditional Lithuanian folk arts and frequently invited contemporary musicians, writers, and authors to their home, such as
Vydūnas,
Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, and
Jonas Basanavičius.
[.] With regards to her strong cultural upbringing, Gimbutas said:
I had the opportunity to get acquainted with writers and artists such as Vydunas, Vaižgantas, even Basanavičius, who was taken care of by my parents. When I was four or five years old, I would sit in Basanavičius's easy chair and I would feel fine. And later, throughout my entire life, Basanavičius's collected folklore remained extraordinarily important for me.
Gimbutas settled in the
temporary capital of Lithuania of
Kaunas with her parents in 1931, where she continued her studies. That year, her parents separated and she lived with her mother and brother, Vytautas, in Kaunas. Five years later, her father died suddenly. At her father's deathbed, Gimbutas pledged that she would study to become a scholar: "All of a sudden I had to think what I shall be, what I shall do with my life. I had been so reckless in sports—swimming for miles, skating, bicycle riding. I changed completely and began to read."
For the next few years, she participated in
ethnographic expeditions to record traditional folklore and studied Lithuanian beliefs and rituals of death.
She graduated with honors from Aušra Gymnasium in Kaunas in 1938 and enrolled in the
Vytautas Magnus University the same year, where she studied
linguistics in the Department of
Philology. She then attended
University of Vilnius to pursue
graduate studies in archaeology under
Jonas Puzinas, linguistics,
ethnology, folklore and
literature.
In 1941, she married
architect Jurgis Gimbutas. The following year, she completed her master's thesis, "Modes of Burial in Lithuania in the Iron Age", with honors.
Gimbutas lived through great turmoil in her homeland during the
Second World War, which was under successive
Soviet and
Nazi occupation from 1940–1941 and 1941–1943, respectively. A year after the birth of their first daughter, Danuté, in June 1942, the young Gimbutas family fled the country in the wake of the Soviet
re-occupation, first to
Vienna and then to
Innsbruck and
Bavaria.
[.] In her reflection of this turbulent period, Gimbutas remarked, "Life just twisted me like a little plant, but my work was continuous in one direction." In 1946, Gimbutas received a
doctorate in
archaeology, with minors in
ethnology and
history of religion, from
Tübingen University with her dissertation "Prehistoric Burial Rites in Lithuania" (in
German), which was published later that year.
While holding a postdoctoral fellowship at Tübingen the following year, Gimbutas gave birth to her second daughter, Živilé. The Gimbutas family left Germany and relocated to the United States in 1949.
Career
After arriving in the United States, Gimbutas immediately went to work at
Harvard University translating Eastern European archaeological texts. She then became a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. In 1955 she was made a Fellow of Harvard's
Peabody Museum.
Kurgan hypothesis
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.
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 her definitive opus,
Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe (1965). In her work she 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.
As a professor of archaeology at
UCLA from 1963 to 1989, Gimbutas directed major
excavations of
Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe between 1967 and 1980, including
Sitagroi and
Achilleion in
Thessaly (Greece). Digging through layers of earth representing a period of time before contemporary estimates for Neolithic habitation in Europe — where other archaeologists would not have expected further finds — she unearthed a great number of
artifacts of daily life and of
religious cults, which she researched and documented throughout her career.
Late feminist archaeology
Gimbutas gained unexpected fame — and notoriety — 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 Civilization of the Goddess articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered
goddess- and woman-centered ("matristic"), and the Bronze Age Indo-European
patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it. According to her interpretations, gynocentric and gylanic societies were peaceful, they honored
homosexuals, and they espoused
economic equality.
The "androcratic", or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the
hierarchical rule of male
warriors.
Gimbutas' books and papers are housed, along with those of her colleague,
mythologist Joseph Campbell, at the Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library on the campus of the
Pacifica Graduate Institute in
Carpinteria, just south of
Santa Barbara, California.
In 1993, Marija Gimbutas received an honorary doctorate at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. On 2 February 1994, Gimbutas died in Los Angeles. Soon afterwards she was interred in Kaunas'
Petrašiūnai Cemetery.
Assessment
Marija Gimbutienė commemorative plaque in
Kaunas, Mickevičius Street
and
Ashley Montagu[Peter Steinfels (1990) . NY Times, February 13, 1990] each compared the importance of Marija Gimbutas' output to the historical importance of the
Rosetta Stone in deciphering Egyptian
hieroglyphs. Campbell provided a foreword to a new edition 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.
Criticism
David Anthony, professor of anthropology at
Hartwick College, disputed Gimbutas's assertion that there was a widespread matriarchal society prior to the Kurgan incursion, and pointed out that Europe had hillforts and weapons, and presumably warfare, long before the Kurgan.
Andrew Fleming, in "The Myth of the Mother Goddess" (
World Archaeology 1969), disagreed with Gimbutas's idea 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. Critics also point to
grave goods as characterizing more familiar Neolithic
gender roles, for which they allege Gimbutas did not account, and question her emphasis on female figures when many male or asexual figures were also found at archaeological sites.
Peter Ucko speculated that Gimbutas's alleged fertility figures were nothing more than Neolithic
dolls and
toys.
Gimbutas' attempts at deciphering
Neolithic signs as
ideograms, in
The Language of the Goddess (1989), received the stiffest scholarly resistance of all her speculations.
Influence on Neo-Pagan movement
Gimbutas's theories have been extended and embraced by a number of authors in the
Neopagan movement, although her peers often regarded Gimbutas's conclusions as speculative. Gimbutas did identify the diverse and complex Paleolithic and Neolithic female representations she recognized as depicting a single universal
Great Goddess, but also as manifesting 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 a tape entitled "The Age of the Great Goddess," she discusses the various manifestations of the Goddess which occur, and stresses the ultimate unity behind them all of the
Earth as feminine.
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.
See also
