1. Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.
Marija Gimbutas was born as Marija Birute Alseikaite to Veronika Janulaityte-Alseikiene and Danielius Alseika in Vilnius, the capital of the Republic of Central Lithuania; her parents were members of the Lithuanian intelligentsia.
Marija Gimbutas's mother received a doctorate in ophthalmology at the University of Berlin in 1908, while her father received his medical degree from the University of Tartu in 1910.
Marija Gimbutas's parents were connoisseurs of traditional Lithuanian folk arts and frequently invited contemporary musicians, writers, and authors to their home, including Vydunas, Juozas Tumas-Vaizgantas, and Jonas Basanavicius.
In 1931, Marija Gimbutas settled with her parents in Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania.
Marija Gimbutas's third daughter, Rasa Julija, was born in 1954 in Boston.
From 1936, Marija Gimbutas participated in ethnographic expeditions to record traditional folklore and studied Lithuanian beliefs and rituals of death.
Marija Gimbutas graduated with honors from Ausra Gymnasium in Kaunas in 1938 and enrolled in the Vytautas Magnus University the same year, where she studied linguistics in the Department of Philology.
Marija Gimbutas then attended the University of Vilnius to pursue graduate studies in archaeology, linguistics, ethnology, folklore and literature.
Marija Gimbutas received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1942.
In 1946, Marija Gimbutas received a doctorate in archaeology, with minors in ethnology and history of religion, from University of Tubingen with her dissertation "Prehistoric Burial Rites in Lithuania", which was published later that year.
Marija Gimbutas often said that she had the dissertation under one arm and her child under the other arm when she and her husband fled the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, in the face of an advancing Soviet army in 1944.
Marija Gimbutas then became a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology.
Marija Gimbutas then taught at UCLA, where she became Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies in 1964 and Curator of Old World Archaeology in 1965.
In 1993, Marija Gimbutas received an honorary doctorate at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.
In 1956 Marija Gimbutas introduced her Kurgan hypothesis, which combined archaeological study of the distinctive Kurgan burial mounds with linguistics to unravel some problems in the study of the Proto-Indo-European speaking peoples, whom she dubbed the "Kurgans"; namely, to account for their origin and to trace their migrations into Europe.
Three genetic studies in 2015 gave support to the Kurgan theory of Marija Gimbutas regarding the Indo-European Urheimat.
The Goddess trilogy articulated what Marija Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered, and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal culture which supplanted it.
The ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak argued in 2011 that a "backlash" against Marija Gimbutas's work had been orchestrated, starting in the last years of her life and following her death.
Marija Gimbutas amasses all the data and then leaps from it to conclusions without any intervening argument.
Peter Ucko and Andrew Fleming were two early critics of the "Goddess" theory, with which Marija Gimbutas later came to be associated.
Cynthia Eller discusses the place of Marija Gimbutas in injecting the idea into feminism in her 2000 book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.