The Civilization of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas

Joseph Campbell and Ashley Montagu each compared Marija Gimbutas' output to the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. 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. 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. 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.

Marija Gimbutas (Vilnius, Lithuania Janu– Los Angeles February 2, 1994) researched the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of ' Old Europe', a term she introduced, in works published between 19, that opened new views by combining traditional spadework, linguistics and mythology.Ī professor of Archaeology at UCLA from 1963 to 1989, 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.

The Civilization of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas