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 positions, they don’t just reflect on their personal encounters with sexism; they start to question the entire ideology behind it. That’s what happened in theology, in history, anthropology, and other fields, while archaeology was really quite a latecomer in that sense. In a way, you could call her an intuitive feminist, or a proto-feminist, as I sometimes do. She was definitely not an anti-feminist; she genuinely supported the women’s movement. Ultimately, I think her refusal of the label was a generational thing.

Marija Gimbutas conducted excavations in the Apulia region of southern Italy, specifically at the Grotta Scaloria cave, as part of her broader research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of Old Europe. Kamilė Krasauskaitė visited one of the caves in Apulia during her Flusso Project residency in 2025. Photo: Kamilė Krasauskaitė 

KL: Gimbutas was criticised for combining archaeology, folklore, and linguistics, an approach her contemporaries considered almost sacrilegious. Today, her ‘archaeomythology’ might be seen as a radical interdisciplinary practice. Could one argue that her greatest legacy is not the Goddess hypothesis itself, but this bold methodological step: an attempt to make the past speak by breaking the established rules of academia?

RN: That’s a very interesting point because we tend to think of science as a single, static entity, whereas it’s constantly changing. Gimbutas built her career at a time when archaeology in the United States was extremely positivist. Her own background, however, was in the European cultural-historical school of archaeology, where it was natural to use historical and ethnographic knowledge to interpret the remnants of the past.

She was frustrated with the archaeology of her time, which she found dry and overly focused on numbers in its attempt to be a ‘hard science’. She, by contrast, was interested in interpretation, in story, and in drawing from the past something that could resonate with people, not just be calculated. It wasn’t until the 1990s that interdisciplinarity softened the field, making her approach seem less provocative. She often said that she was simply trying to do good science. I don’t know if this methodology is her greatest legacy, but it certainly explains why she pursued it.

Marija Alseikaitė in a grain field, 1930s. Photo: Gediminas Trečiokas. Courtesy of the National Museum of Lithuania, GRD 108939/2 

KL: A woman in a man’s world, an exile from Eastern Europe in Western academia, and an interdisciplinary scholar in an age of narrow specialisation. All of this makes Gimbutas a triple outsider. To what extent did this outsider position contribute to her iconic status? Was it precisely this perspective that allowed her to see what her colleagues, secure in the academic centre, could not?

RN: I think it’s generally true that being an outsider makes things more difficult. She always spoke English with an accent, for instance. But on the other hand, she brought knowledge of Eastern European languages and archaeology unmatched by anyone else in the United States at the time, which made her incredibly valuable.

As a part of the Lithuanian-American diaspora, she was also, in a way, an outsider in Lithuania, which made her all the more appealing here. She tried to stay in touch with her roots, giving her first lectures in Vilnius in the 1960s, and later in independent Lithuania. For people living in such an isolated environment, it was extraordinary to have this ‘insider-outsider’ who was Lithuanian yet bringing exciting new ideas from the West. She managed to bridge two worlds, and that contributed to her iconic status. In the United States, her Eastern European roots were romanticised; in Lithuania, her ‘Americanness’ was idealised. This was typical of the diaspora; at one point, all three Baltic states had presidents who were Lithuanian-, Latvian-, or Estonian-Americans. It was a very powerful symbol of connection with the West.

KL: Looking at today’s Instagram witches, wellness culture, and the manifestations of popular feminism, where do you see the ghost of Gimbutas’s Goddess? Is her spirit being faithfully transmitted, or has it become a simplified, commercialised echo that has lost its political edge?

RN: There is always a risk of simplification. I sometimes see people reverting to stereotypical representations of femininity and masculinity, claiming they are returning to ‘authentic’ gender roles. That is absolutely not what Gimbutas’s writing was about. She was engaged in a deeply philosophical discussion of what femininity is. She wasn’t referring to a specific way of dressing, eating habits, or lifestyle.

Her core insight, and the reason she resonated so strongly with feminist theology, was her observation that for thousands of years in our civilisation the image of God has been masculine. The universal principle of life has been imagined in masculine terms. Her radical proposal, through her archaeological work, was to ask what it would mean to think of the miracle of life itself, not just the act of giving birth, but the entire life principle, as feminine. Essentially, God as a woman.

This was a powerful, mind-shifting perspective that shouldn’t be reduced to a binary of gender stereotypes.

Her ideas continue to inspire in many ways, and they have influenced artists from the legendary feminist artist Judy Chicago, whose iconic work The Dinner Party (1974–79) is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum, to contemporary artists such as the Italian Ivana Spinelli, who works with language and signs; the Japanese conceptual artist Tei Kobayashi; the Swedish comic book author Liv Strömquist; and the American queer poet Eileen Myles, to name but a few. Gimbutas’s interpretation of Neolithic heritage has also shaped the work of Eglė Budvytytė, who will represent Lithuania at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, with her project Warmblooded and Earthbound.

I think Gimbutas’s ideas on power and rebirth, on femininity and masculinity, on humanity’s connection to nature, and her attempt to draw inspiration from prehistory and its material remains, are deeply appealing to so many people. They touch something fundamental, and they need not be banal.

KL: What do you think about the recent proposal to name a bridge in Vilnius after Gimbutas? A bridge is a powerful symbol of connection, which she certainly was, but I have second thoughts. A bridge can feel like a masculine symbol, a triumph of engineering. For me, it represents the conquering of the other shore, an intrusive object on the landscape, unlike, say, a ferry, which feels more fluid and feminine.

RN: It’s interesting that a triumph of engineering should be read as masculine. The Old Europe Gimbutas described was a highly developed civilisation with its own technologies and beautiful artefacts. Quality or achievement doesn’t have to be masculine, so I would disagree with you there.

I am strongly in favour of a material memorial to Gimbutas in the centre of Vilnius. She is objectively one of the most famous Lithuanians in the world. But I think it’s crucial that whatever is named after her should be functional, attract people, and fit organically into the landscape. The city must first and foremost be loved by its residents and serve their needs. So if that particular bridge is something that will be enjoyed and used by the people of Vilnius, then it should certainly be named after Marija Gimbutas.

KL: Continuing the topic of symbols, what else could Gimbutas ‘be’? What part of her spirit do we need most right now?

RN: I’ve thought about that, and I have some ideas. Beyond the feminist aspect of her work, which remains so valuable, I think Gimbutas can really help us rethink the notion of patriotism. She was, without a doubt, a Lithuanian patriot. But she represents a kind of patriotism that is often lacking in our collective imagination of what a patriot can be.

Her patriotism was progressive and cosmopolitan. It wasn’t about conquering other nations or being superior; it was about being one among many, about collaboration within Europe. Her vision was pro-European and pro-integration. It embraced minorities, encouraged tolerance, respected diversity, and sought an egalitarian and peaceful society. I think her example can help us to think about being patriotic in a different way.

KL: Instead of a conclusion, I’d like to hear more about how everything we’ve discussed – and beyond – has influenced you as a scholar. Gimbutas came to you through feminist studies, and now you research LGBTQ+ history during the Soviet occupation, another field dedicated to recovering silenced voices and forgotten histories. Do you see a methodological, or perhaps even a spiritual, connection between excavating the lost world of ‘Old Europe’ and uncovering hidden queer histories?

RN: Yes, there is an organic affinity between women’s history, gender studies, and queer history. All involve excavating hidden voices, telling untold stories, and reversing power dynamics. This approach comes from social history. For a long time, neither women nor queer people, among many others, were seen as worthy subjects of history. You know, from a certain perspective, Lithuanian history itself can be seen as small, marginal, peripheral in the global view. But that is precisely the kind of history I am drawn to: the tiny stories that cast a new light on the biggest, most fundamental questions.

Eglė Budvytytė, Warm Blooded and Earthbound (stills), 2024. 4K video, 27 min 40 sec. Image courtesy of the artist 

Endnotes