The Grandmother of Herstory: Marija Gimbutas

Her pioneering work and the witch hunt against her

We stand on the shoulders of many great thinkers, researchers, explorers and cultural weavers throughout time.

Today, we want to honor the late Marija Gimbutas who pioneered an academic understanding of Paleolithic Europe, and the later Indo-European invasions, the roots of women’s power, Goddess veneration and egalitarian societies in Europe. Her work inspired the feminist women’s history revival and many books drew from her work. However, during her lifetime, and also post-death, she went from being at the forefront of her field, to subject to ridicule, and much of her work discredited inside of academia much like a modern-day witch-hunt.

Particularly after her death, she was relentlessly misrepresented in the extreme, pilloried for holding positions that she repeatedly argued against, and demeaned and dismissed—beginning first with a small group of professors and spreading to such an extent that her work is no longer read, assigned, or cited in the classes of many Anglo-American professors of European archaeology … She is barely mentioned in textbooks and was not only toppled but nearly erased entirely.

— Charlene Spretnak (Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning The Work of Marija Gimbutas)

I had my own experience of this, as I joined a Women’s Studies course during my degree, at the London School of Economics, and was told that women’s history had just been removed because it was too ‘contentious’.

With a faith in science, Marija predicted that it would take 35 years for her work to become accepted again by the field. We are already starting to see new findings now corroborate her theories and her reputation is starting to be restored.

---

Profile

Academic: Marija Gimbutas (1921 - 1994)

Lived in: N. America

Ancestry: Lithuanian

Roles: Research Fellow at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University; Professor Emeritus of Archeology at UCLA

Expertise: Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Cultures, Lithuanian Folklore and Art, Goddess Mythology. She led excavations of the Vinca, Starcevo, Karanovo and Sesklo cultures and spoke 16 European languages.

Books: 'The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe' (1974); 'The Language of the Goddess' (1989), 'The Civilization of the Goddess' (1991)

The ‘Venus of Laussel’ La Femme à la Corne Dordogne, France. Paleolithic Approx 25,000 years old