Excavating the Feminine Spirit: Rasa Navickaitė on the Legacy of Marija Gimbutas
Pendant with chain belonging to Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994). Amber, gold, second half of the twentieth century. Courtesy of the National Museum of Lithuania
‘I need to reopen my book,’ Rasa Navickaitė replies to my email, offering a few ideas for our interview. Indeed, some time has passed, and the scholar is now focused on other histories in need of excavation. The book she is referring to is her monumental biography and reception history of the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), first published in English1 before its translation into her and Gimbutas’s mother tongue. A project that began as a history of Lithuanian feminism and evolved into a deep study of a figure whose legacy continues to ripple through academia, spirituality, and politics. In her (and our) home country, Gimbutas is still perhaps less a legend than a myth. She is a powerful, foundational figure whose ideas are often felt more than they are fully understood. She was the architect of the controversial yet profoundly influential theory of ‘Old Europe’: a peaceful, matristic, prehistoric civilisation that existed in Europe between roughly 7000 and 3500 BCE, which worshipped a Great Goddess before being overrun by patriarchal invaders from the East. In our conversation, we focus on the spirit of Gimbutas’s work, its political mutations, and its enduring power to help us rethink both past and future.
Kotryna Lingienė: Gimbutas’s statement, ‘We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity for this has never been greater as we discover that the path of “progress” is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth,’ reads like a manifesto for survival. Yet collective memory is also a construct, one that often leads to myth. Considering the immense power of her vision, how does one navigate the fine line between an inspiring narrative and scholarly integrity? Where did Gimbutas draw the line between the spirit of her ideas and the letter of the evidence?
Rasa Navickaitė: That’s a big question to start with. I think the fine line between being a scientist and a visionary is really at the core of the whole Marija Gimbutas controversy. The fact that she was not afraid to blur that line is a part of her appeal. I believe that she, as an archaeologist working with prehistory, understood that she was dealing with a period people have always woven narratives around and used them for political goals in one way or another. It’s one thing to describe something in a scholarly way, and Gimbutas was indeed a very precise scholar and archaeologist, but it’s another thing entirely to tell a certain story about the past. And I think she understood just how important those stories could be.
Marija Alseikaitė in nature, 1930s. Photo: Gediminas Trečiokas. Courtesy of the National Museum of Lithuania, GRD 108939/4
Today, it’s far less controversial to rethink prehistory in a radically new way. We’re accustomed to those kinds of narratives and rethinkings of the ancient past. I’m thinking, for example, about the bestselling book, Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari. He and many others have recently pointed out that certain moments in our prehistoric past, which we used to think of as moments of progress, such as the agricultural revolution, can be read in very different ways. We still have to value it as technological progress, but we also have to understand that this did not necessarily contribute to human happiness or well-being. There can be many different interpretations and many different stories told about that moment, yet the evidence, the facts themselves, do not change.
Gimbutas, too, stressed that what we think of as progress, as the building of our civilisation, did not always bring greater happiness.
KL: Still, the creation of the ‘Old Europe’ idyll inevitably requires overlooking the harsher aspects of prehistory that archaeology also records – traces of violence, social inequality, and disease. What is the intellectual, perhaps even ethical, cost of such a selective vision? What do we put at stake by choosing to see only the spiritual side of the past?
RN: I have asked myself this question so many times. It’s one thing to critically re-evaluate inherited narratives; it’s another to create this imaginary past, this golden age myth, which some argue Gimbutas did. As a historian writing about her, I knew I didn’t have to believe in the narrative she told; I just had to understand the power it held for others. It’s actually quite funny because when I met people who were really inspired by her ideas, particularly spiritual feminists in the US, they genuinely asked me, ‘Do you believe in her vision?’, as if it were a religious faith. It would put me in an uncomfortable position because, as a scholar, I obviously cannot subscribe to believing in an idea I am analysing critically.
However, it’s one thing to look critically and sceptically in a scholarly manner, as I did in my book, whereas in life we do end up subscribing to certain beliefs and narratives. We cannot constantly doubt everything. So I think Gimbutas also understood that, and this is where she definitely crossed the line from being merely a scholar. My sense is that she also wanted to create a story that people would believe in.
However, with Gimbutas, it is also crucial to examine the intentions behind the stories she told. We know that some anti-modernist stories about a golden past have certainly been told in a right-wing, fascist way. Nazi ideology, for instance, took the story of the arrival of the Indo-Europeans as a foundational myth, framing Aryans as a racially superior force. Gimbutas, however, told the absolute opposite story. She described a peaceful, settled, highly developed civilisation in Europe that was colonised by warlike people who were not more advanced or somehow superior, but rather more primitive and aggressive. She chose to focus on the peaceful culture of Old Europe as an antidote to those fascist narratives of domination.
This is why I see her thought as deeply embedded in the New Left thinking of the latter half of the twentieth century. Intellectually, she was part of the anti-war, feminist, civil rights, and environmentalist movements, which were also seeking alternative narratives of the past. They were trying to build an ideology that was anti-modernist, but in a way that was fundamentally opposed to right-wing ideology.
KL: This very elegantly leads to my next question about the roots of Gimbutas’s work, which are anchored in our region’s experience of war, loss, and the search for identity. How did she manage to ‘translate’ this specific perspective into a narrative that resonated so powerfully with a Western audience? And wasn’t a crucial part of the original idea’s spirit lost in this process of translation, causing the idea to mutate?
RN: Critics have long noted the parallel between her theory – a peaceful Old Europe being destroyed by invaders from the East – and her own displacement from Lithuania by the Soviet occupation during the Second World War. While this is an interesting echo, I don’t think her theory should be reduced to autobiography. She consciously chose to talk about both prehistory and the Eastern European experience in her later works.
Regarding the ‘translation’ of her ideas, I see her work as a decolonial move. She entered the ongoing debates about the conflicting memories of the Second World War in Europe. Many scholars have noted that the trauma of the Second World War is told predominantly from a Western European and American perspective. Even the Holocaust, as Timothy Snyder argues, is often reduced to the image of Auschwitz, and only the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany are given sufficient popular historical attention. The reality was that this massive region of Eastern Europe was a killing zone for Jewish people and countless other innocent people of many ethnicities: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belarusians, Roma, Russians…
While the war is often framed as a victory against Nazism, Stalinism is frequently left out of that story. For Gimbutas, it was crucial to emphasise the suffering inflicted by Stalinism on the many nations and peoples of Eastern Europe. I see this as a decolonial move from our region, one that is particularly important in the current context of the war in Ukraine. For Gimbutas, the Stalinist terror represented the peak of the destructive, annihilating power of modernity.
KL: What about the feminist dimension of her work, which was so in line with the whole 1970s vibe? Did she just appear at the right time and place, providing a scholarly foundation for a spiritual need already present? And yet she rejected the feminist label. Was that a strategic move to protect her scholarly image in a male-dominated environment, or did it reflect a deeper disagreement with the feminist ideas of her era?
RN: This question gets to the heart of what motivated me to write my book. I wanted to understand precisely this connection between Gimbutas and the feminism of her time. My conclusion is that nothing is ever a coincidence. People are a product of their time, and Gimbutas was as well. It’s no coincidence that she wrote about goddess-worshipping prehistoric societies where women had dominant roles just as the second wave of feminism was flourishing in the United States. She was clearly in sync with the spirit of the time.
But she never participated in feminist activism or adopted the label. I think you are right – that it was partly a strategic move to protect her scholarly integrity. To understand this, it’s crucial to look at her generation. She was born in 1921. When she began her career in the 1950s, struggling for recognition and confronting sexism at Harvard, there was no secondwave feminism yet. When she was appointed professor at the University of California in 1963, it was just one year after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. So, at the very beginning of the feminist movement in the US, Gimbutas was already an established academic with ideas of her own.
Ten years later, in 1973, she wrote The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe. By then, feminism had entered academia, and many educated women were pursuing similar lines of thought. When you allow women into leadership position