Reading Marija Gimbutas

The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected Articles from 1952-1993 by Marija Gimbutas. Edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Karlene Jones-Bley. (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 18.) Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 1997, 404 pp., $52.00 paperback.

The Living Goddesses by Marija Alseikaite Gimbutas. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1999, 290 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas edited by Joan Marler. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas and Trends, Inc., 1997, 659 pp., $45.95 paper.

Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Marija Gimbutas edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Edgar C. Polomé. (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 19.) Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 1997, 265 pp., $48.00 paper.

In 1974 Marija Gimbutas, previously known for her theories about Indo-European cultures, published a scholarly work with an academic press on neolithic and chalcolithic Europe. Titled The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, this book argued that the neolithic (stone age) and chalcolithic (copper age) cultures of Old Europe 6500-3500 bce were peaceful, matrifocal, egalitarian, sedentary, agricultural, highly artistic, and worshiped the Goddess. These cultures, Gimbutas argued, were overthrown between 4500 and 2500 bce by patriarchal invaders who domesticated horses, worshiped male sky gods, and spoke Indo-European languages. Had it been published twenty years earlier, Gimbutas's book on Old Europe and the two that followed, The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) might have been quietly ignored.

But Gimbutas's book was published at about the same time as Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father (1973); the first issue of WomanSpirit magazine (1974); Z. Budapest's Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows (1975); and Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman (1976). It quickly became one of the works cited in support of the burgeoning feminist spirituality movement's contention that women were better off in ancient societies that worshiped the Goddess than they were in later cultures and in our own. Soon conservative professors of classics and archaeology (at that time mostly male) were confronted with enthusiastic women students wanting to study Goddess religions and cultures. These women argued (correctly, I believe, though sometimes citing questionable sources) that the study of the past was tainted by patriarchal presuppositions.

In this climate the work of Marija Gimbutas became the center of a storm of academic and popular controversy. Uncomfortable with her claims about the past, Gimbutas's colleagues began to question her scholarly objectivity. In his essay in Marler's collection, Edgar Polomé provides the following assessment of Gimbutas's work on Old Europe:

The idyllic image of the genteel civilization that the Indo-European ruffians were supposed to have violently smashed was strongly criticized by her colleagues, but it provided an attractive picture, tainted by modern feminism [italics added] ¹, of what survived in the Cycladic culture . . . before the coming of the Indo-European steppe-nomads. (105)

Other scholars are far less genteel in their criticisms. When I stated that I was interested in the work of Marija Gimbutas at a reception at the American Classical School in Athens, a woman professor to whom I had just been introduced, started screaming at me that Marija Gimbutas had ruined the field of archaeology for other women, concluding that she taught Gimbutas's work as an example of how NOT to do feminist archaeology. Polomé's use of the code words "idyllic," "genteel," "ruffians," "violently smashed," and "tainted" are characteristic of the patronizing way Gimbutas's work has been dismissed. Gimbutas, it is argued, abandoned scientific objectivity in her later work and "indulged" in the "romantic fantasy" of a "golden age." Though no one disputes the Indo-Europeans were violent and warlike, Polomé's choice of the word "ruffians" to depict Gimbutas's theory makes it...