| Marija Gimbutas |
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Information AboutMarija Gimbutas |
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| 1921 births | |
| 1994 deaths | |
| lithuanian-americans | |
| lithuanian archaeologists | |
| women archaeologists | |
| archaeological theory | |
| bronze age europe | |
| pre-indo-europeans | |
| prehistoric art | |
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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 Gimbutas earned a reputation as a world-class specialist on the Indo-European Bronze Age as well as on , 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, and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal cultural elements. According to her speculation, both systems fused to form the classical European societies. 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. ASSESSMENT Joseph Campbell and Ashley Montagu each compared Marija Gimbutas' output to the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyph ics. 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''. SEE ALSO
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