Marija Gimbutas

From Freepedia

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, in works published between 1946 and 1971, that opened new views by combining traditional spadework, linguistics and mythology.

Contents

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 in Germany, though she never forgot her Lithuanian heritage. She began immediately at Harvard University, translating Eastern European archaeological texts, and becoming 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" combining archaeology of the distinctive burial mounds called "Kurgans" with linguistics to unravel the problem of the origins of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking peoples, whom she named "Kurgans" and to trace their migrations into Europe. This hypothesis, and the act of bridging the disciplines, has had a significant impact on Indo-European research.

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 researched and documented an enormous amount of archaeological findings and by happenstance dug deeper, below the known surface to unearth an overwhelming number of art and daily life objects of Neolithic cultures of Europe.

Work

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 the Slavs, partly summed up in the definitive Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe (1965), but she gained unexpected fame 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 the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal cultural elements, which she claimed 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 hieroglyphics. Joan Marler has written, "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, note early fortifications and criticize her emphasis on the female figures among many male or asexual figures. Andrew Fleming [1], "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 female figures were symbols of a goddess. Peter Ucko [2] even speculated that fertility figures were 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 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.

Works

  • Gimbutas, Marija 1946. Die Bestattung 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, M. ,1961. Notes on the chronology and expansion of the Pit-grave culture, in J. Bohm & S. J. De Laet (eds), L’Europe a 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.
  • The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974)
  • 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.
  • The Civilization of the Goddess (1991)
  • Gimbutas, Marija 1992. Die Ethnogenese der europäischen Indogermanen. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft , Vorträge und kleinere Schriften 54.
  • M. D. Robbins/K. Jones-Bley 1997 (eds), The Kurgan culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe. Selected articles from 1952 to 1993 by M. Gimbutas. Journal Indo-European studies monogr. 18, Washington DC: 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), Wither archaeology? Papers in honour of Evzen Neustupny (Praha, Akademie: 211-229.

External links

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