Marija Gimbutas was born and raised in Lithuania in a family that had the highest respect for scholarship. From her earliest years, it was assumed that she would give something of value to society. Her parents were physicians, and both were devoted to preserving their folk culture that was being destroyed by a series of foreign occupations. Marija told me about an experience she had as a child, watching people work in traditional ways that began her own interest in the study of folklore, and eventually ethnology and archaeology: 

     "The old women used sickles and sang while they worked. The songs were very authentic, very ancient. At that moment I fell in love with what is ancient because it was a deep communication and oneness with Earth. I was completely captivated." 
     During the 19th century, Lithuania was ruled by Russia. Marija grew up under Polish occupation. During the Second World War, while working on her graduate degrees in archaeology, Lithuania was dominated by Soviet Russia and then Germany. Of that period she said, "Life twisted me like a little plant, but my work was continuous in one direction." When the second Soviet invasion was in process, she fled Lithuania with her husband and infant daughter, and spent the war years in Austria and Germany. Immediately after the war, Marija enrolled in Tübingen University and completed her doctorate in archaeology, combined with linguistics, ethnology, literature and comparative religion.  
     The Gimbutas family came to the United States in 1949, and Marija spent thirteen years as a researcher at Harvard University. In 1955 she became a fellow of the Peabody Museum, a lifetime honor. The books she wrote during those years established her as a respected scholar of the Indo-European Bronze Ageand of the prehistory of the Balts and the Slavs. In 1963 she accepted a position at UCLA, and remained there as a professor of European archaeology until she retired in 1989.  
     The Bronze Age is typified by the burials of dominant males with caches of weapons. Having traveled extensively in eastern Europe to study the archaeological material, it was clear to Marija that something very different was happening before the Bronze Age, and she became impassioned to find out what that was. Although numerous excavations were being done on Neolithic sites, and she had studied every excavation report in its original language, no one had presented an overview to answer her questions. So she decided to conduct her own research, and turned her attention to an in-depth investigation of the earlier Neolithic cultures. Fortunately, UCLA had money for such projects in those days, so between 1967 and 1980, Marija Gimbutas became project director of five major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeast Europe. 
    As long as Gimbutas was describing Bronze Age artifacts, she was considered a respected scholar. She soon realized, however, that in the earliest levels of excavation, there were no weapons of war or signs of male domination. It also became clear to her that descriptions of the material culture would not be enough. It would be impossible to understand the cultural development of the Neolithic period without acknowledging that an Earth-based spirituality was central to every aspect of life. Therefore, she employed an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, which she eventually called archaeomythology. I often heard her say, "All I ever wanted was to find the truth." Other researchers had noticed the relative peacefulness of these early societies and the prevalence of female figurines. It was Marija, however, who had the audacity to speak of this imagery as sacred expressions of the deity in a female form. She used the word "Goddess" and spoke of it as "all life in Nature." She also coined the term "Old Europe" to refer to the earliest settled farming societies of Europe, which she considered to be pre-patriarchal. In southeast Europe, the dates of this era are approximately 6500-3500 BC. 
     Marija's research covers a vast territory of scholarship that crosses many traditional boundaries. When she was criticized for her interpretations, her response was philosophical: 
     There is a belief that religion cannot be reconstructed, that it's a waste of time even to speak of religion because archaeologists cannot do it. Maybe this is because they are not really trained. They are not interested in mythology at all, and are just seeing the material culture. They don't want to see anything else; they think they are safe in reconstructing the ways of agriculture or how pottery was made, and that satisfies them. In our days there are no people with vision. They cannot go across the border of their discipline. Archaeology now is interested mostly in excavation techniques and they want to be very precise; the computer is used, and all that. Of course, you can reach some conclusions using statistics, but if you do not have a vision as a person--if you are not a poet, or an artist--you cannot see much. You will be just a technician, and this is in most cases what happens. (from taped interview by author, San Francisco, Nov. 8, 1987). 
     I have a profound respect for this woman who devoted her entire life to the cultivation of an encyclopedic scholarship in the midst of enormous hardships. She trusted her own vision, and encouraged each one of us to trust ourselves as well. "Don't be sheep!" she often said. "Do what you want to do. It's very important to be mobilized, to have determination to do what is meaningful. If you feel a need to do something, you must do it!" Only then can we perceive and bring forth a new world.