Marija Gimbutas ( Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė; January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994) was a Lithuanian-American 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 .
What did Vilnia Gimbutas’ parents do?
After Lithuania regained independence in 1918, Gimbutas’s parents founded the first Lithuanian hospital in the capital. During this period, her father also served as the publisher of the newspaper Vilniaus Žodis and the cultural magazine Vilniaus Šviesa and was an outspoken proponent of Lithuanian independence during the Polish–Lithuanian War.
What is the contribution of Vera Gimbutas?
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Gimbutas earned a reputation as a world-class specialist on Bronze Age Europe, as well as on Lithuanian folk art and the prehistory of the Balts and Slavs, partly summed up in her definitive opus, Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe (1965).
When was Danutė Gimbutas born?
Gimbutas’ first daughter, Danutė, was born in June 1942. Early in 1944 the young Gimbutas family, in the face of an advancing Soviet army, fled the country to areas controlled by Nazi Germany, first to Vienna and then to Innsbruck and Bavaria.
Is gimbuta’s work vanishing in the mist?
Marija Gimbuta’s revolutionary work is vanishing in the mist and becomes increasingly distanced from our modern consciousness the more we are getting close to the final phase of the era called the “anthropocen”, based on the so-called “scientific” worldview according to Dawkins at al.
Where is Rasa Julija Gimbutas buried?
In the 1950s, the Gimbutas family left Germany and relocated to the United States, where Gimbutas had a successful academic career. Her third daughter, Rasa Julija, was born in 1954 in Boston. Gimbutas died in Los Angeles in 1994, at age 73. Soon afterwards, she was interred in Kaunas’s Petrašiūnai Cemetery .
