Marija Gimbutas

Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas bij steen 52, Newgrange, Ierland, in september 1989
Persoonlijke gegevens
Volledige naam	Marija Birutė Alseikaitė
Geboortedatum	23 januari 1921
Geboorteplaats	Wilno
Overlijdensdatum	2 februari 1994
Overlijdensplaats	Los Angeles
Academische achtergrond
Alma mater	Vytautas Magnus University Universiteit van Vilnius
Wetenschappelijk werk
Vakgebied	Archeologie
Bekend van	Koerganhypothese
Onderzoek	Neolithische en bronstijdculturen van het "Oude Europa"
Bekende werken	Zie lijst

Marija Gimbutas (Litouws: Marija Gimbutienė, geboren als Marija Birutė Alseikaitė) (Wilno, 23 januari 1921 – Los Angeles, 2 februari 1994) was een Litouws-Amerikaans archeologe en als zodanig een onderzoekster van de neolithische en bronstijdculturen van het "Oude Europa", een door haar ingevoerde term. Haar tussen 1946 en 1971 uitgegeven werken introduceerden nieuwe zienswijzen door traditioneel veldwerk te combineren met linguïstische en mythologische interpretaties. Veel van haar werk wordt tegenwoordig echter niet meer geaccepteerd.^[1][2]

Veel archeologen die zich richten op mythologie en religie willen niet geassocieerd worden met Gimbutas en de godinnenbeweging.^[3]

1. ↑ Through numerous publications in English, Gimbutas constructed an image of a Neolithic, agrarian, unified, and highly conservative Eastern European religion, combining through ‘archeomythology’ the relevant matriarchal, ‘Goddess’ evidence with folklore data, especially from the Baltic area (Gimbutas 1982, 1991). Her theory of the kurgan (Rus. ‘hillock’) invasion (namely, Indo-European migration) and of the subsistence of the matriarchal religion and culture of ‘Old Europe’ can now be understood as an instance of a common, major flaw in Eastern European approaches to the theme of the religious substratum, shared by many folklorists and mythologists who still see prehistoric deities, symbols, and myths in the slightly Romanticized folk traditions of illiterate societies that were recorded in the nineteenth century. Gimbutas eventually became personally interested in Neopaganism (Iwersen 2005), and much of her scholarly legacy is not accepted nowadays. Alles, G.D. (2008)
2. ↑ This effort to establish credible feminist approaches to archaeology has been threatened by Gimbutas’s work, with her claims to archaeological credentials. The enormous enthusiasm for the work of Gimbutas and her followers in the popular culture and the disdain in which it is nonetheless held by most professional archaeologists put feminist archaeologists between a rock and a hard place. They needed to make clear their own critique of such work as professional archaeologists, while at the same time defending the appropriateness of raising feminist questions in archaeology, albeit in a way that would not be confused with Gimbutas’s approach. [...] Much of Gimbutas’s reconstruction of the Goddess religion seems eisegesis - that is, it involves reading into ancient artifacts a predetermined worldview in which she already has come to believe.Ruether, R.R. (2006)
3. ↑ Many archaeologists react with alarm when their work is associated with alternative religious beliefs and their impact on the public discourse and reception of archaeology. There is an overriding fear that their work will be classified alongside somehow equated with Marija Gimbutas' work on prehistoric figurines and the so-called "Mother-Goddess-Movement. Biehl, P.F. (1997): 'Overcoming the "Mother-Goddess-Movement": A New Approach to the Study of Human Representations' in Vasks, A. (ed.): Selected Papers of the Second Annual Meeting European Association of Archaeologists in Riga/Latvia (1996), Proceedings of the Latvian Academy of Science, p. 59-67