Marija Gimbutas

Marija Gimbutas by Kerbstone 52, at the back of Newgrange, Co. Meath, Ireland, in September 1989.

Marija Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė) (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.

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Biography

Born as Marija Birutė Alseikaitė in Vilnius (then occuped by Poland), she settled in the temporary capital of Lithuania, Kaunas, with her parents in 1931, where she continued her studies. She graduated from Aušra Gymnasium in 1938 and enrolled in the Vytautas Magnus University Faculty of Humanities the same year. Marija Alseikaitė graduated from Vilnius University in 1942 and married architect Jurgis Gimbutas. Marija Gimbutas lived through great turmoil in her native Lithuania during the Second World War, and had to flee to Germany in 1944 due to the Soviet re-occupation of her homeland. After earning a Ph.D. in archaeology at Tübingen University in 1946, she 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

Joseph Campbell and Ashley Montagu[1][2] 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.

Joan Marler, Gimbutas' personal editor[2] and founder of the Institute of Archaeomythology, 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".[3]

Criticism

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 critics quoted in that piece expressing similar sentiments include Ruth Tringham, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Linda Ellis.[4]

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.[2]

Andrew Fleming, "The Myth of the Mother Goddess," (World Archaeology 1969)[5] 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[6] 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 manifesting 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 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

References

  1. ↑ "According to anthropologist Ashley Montagu, "Marija Gimbutas has given us a veritable Rosetta Stone of the greatest heuristic value for future work in the hermeneutics of archaeology and anthropology." [1]
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Peter Steinfels (1990) Idyllic Theory Of Goddesses Creates Storm. NY Times, February 13, 1990
  3. ↑ "Marija Gimbutas - Life and Work", Joan Marler, January 1995
  4. ↑ Peter Steinfels, "Idyllic Theory Of Goddesses Creates Storm," New York Times, Feb 13, 1990.
  5. ↑ Fleming 1969
  6. ↑ Peter UCKO: Institute of Archaeology UCL

Sources

Works

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