Marija Gimbutas

Three genetic studies in 2015 gave support to the Kurgan theory of Gimbutas regarding the Indo-European Urheimat. According to those studies, Y-chromosome haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) would have expanded from the Russian steppes, along with the Indo European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European languages.

The 2009 book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism by Cathy Gere examines the political influence on archaeology more generally. Through the example of Knossos on the island of Crete, which had been represented as the paradigm of a pacifist, matriarchal and sexually free society, Gere claims that archaeology can easily slip into reflecting what people want to see, rather than teaching people about an unfamiliar past.

Gimbutas died in Los Angeles in 1994, at age 73. Soon afterwards, she was interred in Kaunas's Petrašiūnai Cemetery.

Joseph Campbell and Ashley Montagu each compared the importance of Gimbutas's output to the historical importance of the Rosetta Stone in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Campbell provided a foreword to a new edition of Gimbutas's 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. The ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak argued in 2011 that a "backlash" against Gimbutas's work had been orchestrated, starting in the last years of her life and following her death.

Gimbutas gained fame and notoriety in the English-speaking world with her last three English-language books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989), which inspired an exhibition in Wiesbaden, 1993–94; and the last of the three, The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), which, based on her documented archaeological findings, presented an overview of her conclusions about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion, and the nature of literacy.

Fleming, in his 1969 paper "The Myth of the Mother Goddess", questioned the practice of identifying neolithic figures as female when they weren't clearly distinguished as male and took issue with other aspects of the "Goddess" interpretation of Neolithic stone carvings and burial practices. Cynthia Eller also discusses the place of Gimbutas in inoculating the idea into feminism in her 2000 book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.

Peter Ucko and Andrew Fleming were two early critics of the "Goddess" theory, with which Gimbutas later came to be associated. Ucko, in his 1968 monograph Anthropomorphic figurines of predynastic Egypt warned against unwarranted inferences about the meanings of statues. He notes, for example, that early Egyptian figurines of women holding their breasts had been taken as "obviously" significant of maternity or fertility, but the Pyramid Texts revealed that in Egypt this was the female gesture of grief.

Gimbutas then taught at UCLA, where she became Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies in 1964 and Curator of Old World Archaeology in 1965. In 1993, Gimbutas received an honorary doctorate at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.

As a Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies at UCLA from 1963 to 1989, Gimbutas directed major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe between 1967 and 1980, including Anzabegovo, near Štip, Republic of Macedonia, and 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 religion or spirituality, which she researched and documented throughout her career.

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 her method of bridging the disciplines, has had a significant impact on Indo-European studies.

While holding a postdoctoral fellowship at Tübingen the following year, Gimbutas gave birth to her second daughter, Živilė. In the 1950s, the Gimbutas family left Germany and relocated to the United States, where Gimbutas had a successful academic career. Her third daughter, Rasa Julija, was born in 1954 in Boston.

After arriving in the United States in the 1950s, 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.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Gimbutas earned a reputation as a world-class specialist on Bronze Age Europe, 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.

From 1947 to 1949 she did postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Munich.

In 1946, Gimbutas received a doctorate in archaeology, with minors in ethnology and history of religion, from University of Tübingen with her dissertation "Prehistoric Burial Rites in Lithuania" ("Die Bestattung in Litauen in der vorgeschichtlichen Zeit"), which was published later that year. She often said that she had the dissertation under one arm and her child under the other arm when she and her husband fled the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, in the face of an advancing Soviet army in 1944.

Gimbutas' first daughter, Danutė, was born in June 1942. Early in 1944 the young Gimbutas family, in the face of an advancing Soviet army, fled the country to areas controlled by Nazi Germany, 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 1942 she completed her master's thesis, "Modes of Burial in Lithuania in the Iron Age", with honors. She received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1942.

In 1941, she married architect Jurgis Gimbutas. During the Second World War, Gimbutas lived under the Soviet occupation (1940–41) and then the German occupation (1941–43).

From 1936, Gimbutas 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 the University of Vilnius to pursue graduate studies in archaeology (under Jonas Puzinas), linguistics, ethnology, folklore and literature.

Mainstream archaeology dismissed Gimbutas's later works. Anthropologist Bernard Wailes (1934–2012) of the University of Pennsylvania commented to The New York Times that most of Gimbutas's peers believe her to be "immensely knowledgeable but not very good in critical analysis. ... She amasses all the data and then leaps from it to conclusions without any intervening argument." He said that most archaeologists consider her to be an eccentric.

In 1931, Gimbutas settled with her parents in Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania. After her parents separated that year, 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."

Marija Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė, Lithuanian pronunciation: ​['ɡɪmbutas]; January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994) was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

Her mother received a doctorate in ophthalmology at the University of Berlin in 1908, while her father received his medical degree from the University of Tartu in 1910. After Lithuania regained independence in 1918, Gimbutas's parents organized the Lithuanian Association of Sanitary Aid which founded the first Lithuanian hospital in the capital.