So polarized has this debate
become that, as Wendy Griffin has observed of Marija Gimbutas, "Her
theories tend to be judged as either absolutely true or absolutely false..."
[Griffin, 2000] It is impossible to mention the work of Gimbutas in academia
without being caught up in a heated dispute. A positive mention is immediately
assumed to indicate total agreement with every interpretation she ever
wrote, and to warrant heated attack. In this charged atmosphere, the content
of her work invariably gets lost, and the documentation she provided is
never evaluated. Those who dismiss her work as being about "matriarchy"
and a "mother goddess," terms she explicitly rejected, misrepresent
her much more complex views. [See Joan Marler’s defense of Gimbutas’
contributions and historical narrative, 1999]
By any account, Marija Gimbutas had a distinguished
career as a 20th-century archaeologist 
and
a primary founder of modern Indo-European studies. She excavated sites
of the Vinca, Starcevo, Karanovo and Sesklo cultures. Her ability to read
sixteen European languages enabled her to study virtually all the archaeological
literature on both sides of the Cold War split, a crucial skill since
most key publications in her study area were written in eastern European
languages. It was Gimbutas who laid pivotal groundwork for integrating
archaelogical data with linguistic studies of Indo-European origins. Her
model for Indo-European origins is still the leading theory in the field.
Its basic outlines are upheld -- minus the focus on women’s status
and goddess interpretations -- by her former student J.P. Mallory, now
one of the top authorities in IE Studies.
Eller acknowledges the "tremendous
linguistic expertise" Gimbutas possessed, and her "encyclopedic
knowledge of Central and Eastern European archaeological sites that permitted
her to speculate effectively on 'big picture' questions." [Eller,
38] However, Eller completely sidesteps the Lithuanian scholar’s
heavily footnoted analysis of why she thinks the kurgan-builders were
invaders, and why patriarchal. She declines to compare Gimbutas' work
to theories of the archaeological establishment, claiming that it would
be "ultimately unfair to all parties involved. There is no archaeological
consensus..." -- and furthermore, everyone has an agenda, even the
traditionalist men. [Eller, 95] (No kidding, but what happened to the
thorough debunking promised in the introduction?) What is truly unfair
is to condemn a scholar’s work without bothering to analyze her
text. Eller never describes Gimbutas' theory in
its own right or quotes from her historical analysis. Instead she assails
it through a pastiche of descriptions by her detractors and supporters.
Then she declares that the argument that IE spread from steppes through
military conquest "is completely speculative." [Eller, 166]
At this point Eller resorts to outright
misrepresentation. She writes, “As J.P. Mallory summarizes, ‘almost
all of the arguments for invasion and cultural transformations are far
better explained without reference to Kurgan expansions’.”
[165] Reading this came as a shock, because my understanding of Mallory's
position is quite different. I had to look it up; sure enough, he says
the opposite: “One might at first imagine that the economy of argument
involved with the Kurgan solution should oblige us to accept it outright.
But critics do exist and their objections can be summarized quite simply”—and
here follows the phrase Eller so misleadingly cites. [Mallory, 185]
Mallory spends pages laying out the evidence
for a Pontic-Caspian steppe origin for the Indo-Europeans: “the
present formulation of this theory owes much to the publications of Marija
Gimbutas who has argued for over 25 years that the Proto-Indo-European
homeland should be identified with her Kurgan tradition.” Mallory
explains that the region she proposes (southern Ukraine/Russia) “evidences
all the attributes of a putative Indo-European society reconstructed from
linguistic evidence.... a warlike pastoral society, highly mobile...”
which expanded into Europe. [Mallory, 182-183] In support of the invasion
theory, he notes key evidence of change in Balkan mortuary practice:
there appear alien burials morphologically identical to those on the steppe. These are generally confined to males and are accompanied by weapons—arrows, spears and knives... The rite of suttee, the sacrificial execution of a woman on the death of her husband, is indicated in some burials suggesting the patriarchal character of the warrior pastoralists who superimposed themselves on the local agricultural populations. [Mallory, 184]
Other changes occur: population displacement (in
every direction but east), abandonment of Old European tell sites, dissolution
of the tradition of fine painted ceramics, and “infusion of a new
physical type into the Danube region which can easily be traced back to
the steppe region.” Mallory calls this "something of a Balkan
‘dark age’,” and further writes of “unequivocal
evidence” for steppe intrusions into the Balkans in the mid-3rd
millennium BCE. [Mallory, 239, 251] All this is straight out of Gimbutas.
Mallory does not follow his teacher in every detail (for example, he disagrees
with her analysis of the northern Globular Amphora cultures), but he draws
heavily on her synthesis of archaeological and linguistic studies. Her
influence is also strong among eastern European scholars. The prominent
Russian archaeologist Nikolai Merpert wrote in 1997 that “generally,
new archaeological data continues to confirm the conception of Marija
Gimbutas concerning the Indo-Europeanization of southeastern Europe."
[in Marler, 1997, 76]
But Cynthia Eller is dismissive: “Neither
is there any positive evidence that the Kurgans from the Russian steppes
were an exceptionally brutal, supremely patriarchal people.” [Eller,
179] She does not mention the women executed for burial with the dominant
males around whom these early kurgan graves are centered, nor of the absence
of kurgan burials of women in their own right. At this point, I started
to question if Eller had actually read Gimbutas’ documentation of
the kurgan “suttee”-burials. Civilization of the Goddess details
their appearance in the Sredny Stog and Yamnaya steppe cultures, and their
westward spread with the kurgan graves.
Eller concludes that Gimbutas’ thesis is
a “house of cards,” insisting that we can’t say that
Indo-European conquest brought about a more patriarchal social order in
the Balkans. [179] Her omission of the burials with executed women is
striking in light of a suggestion she makes elsewhere in the book. While
claiming that there is no real evidence for “matriarchy,”
Eller proposes an example of the evidence that would really prove female
“dominance”: a rich woman buried with murdered men! [115]
By her own criterion, the archaeological evidence demonstrates that the
kurgan-builders belonged to a male-dominated society—even if she
refuses to discuss that evidence. (It is buried in a short footnote.)
Crucially, Eller’s projection of a patriarchy-in-reverse shows that
she has failed to grasp the most basic points made by the feminist historians
she is attacking.
It’s understandable that many feminists
have seized on Marija Gimbutas as a feminist prehistorian with academic
viability. Most don't have access to the higher echelons of academia,
and even less to a historically male-dominated field like archaeology.
What made Gimbutas stand out among her contemporaries was her bold attention
to issues of women’s status. For anyone who has waded through archaeological
monographs that bury this kind of information, her writing contrasts sharply
to the traditional silence about women’s social position.
The accusation is often repeated that Gimbutas made
interpretations without supporting evidence—unlike other archaeologists.
But this is just not credible. Interpretation goes on all the time, and
it is charged with political ramifications. Brian Hayden, one of Gimbutas'
most vociferous critics, has gone out on a long theoretical limb with
his claim that Old Europe was dominated by Big Men. But even in the complete
absence of evidence, interpretations of “princely” or “priestly”
complexes are never as controversial as calling female figurines goddesses.
For example, Jean-Pierre Mohen's attempts to contort west European megalithic
societies to his preconceptions would be funny if they weren’t so
depressingly typical of stuff I've read for years: “The standardized
design of neolithic houses indicate a largely egalitarian society: but
could this not have included a dominant family, even if it lacked some
or all the material signs of power?” Mohen also assumes, without
offering any evidence, that the megaliths were the seat of power of a
chief endowed with divine authority. [Mohen, 1990]
For all the glaring flaws in his Indo-European origin
hypothesis (and it has attracted much criticism from linguists and archaeologists)
Colin Renfrew never encountered the contemptuous response that Gimbutas
received. (In his version, it is the Indo-Europeans who bring agriculture
to Europe from Anatolia and are responsible for the civilization of neolithic
Old Europe.) Women scholars who challenge doctrines of gender hierachy
can expect a much harsher reception. Lawrence Osborne attacked Gimbutas
for making the original kurgan culture (circa 4400-3500 BCE) out as “patriarchal
villains.” After all, weren’t women warriors excavated in
late kurgan burials (circa 600-200 BCE). Osborne simply ignores the 3000-year
time gap and probable ethnic discontinuity between the two societies,
calling them “the same culture.” [Osborne, 1997]
Naomi Goldenberg vividly illustrates what Gimbutas
was up against in her description of a 1972 symposium she attended in
Italy. She was deeply impressed by Gimbutas’ learned, precise presentation,
but found that male colleagues not only did not share her enthusiasm but
didn’t take her work seriously, laughing behind her back. By contrast,
a Swedish archaeologist who had dismissed Gimbutas out of hand (while
commenting to Goldenberg that “She used to be quite a sexpot”)
was applauded for “one of the more absurd papers of the conference,”
based on his speculation that Norse priests had stood on two dents in
a rock. [in Marler, 1997, 43]
Eller dismisses charges that Gimbutas was put down for
concluding that neolithic Europe was matricentric and goddess worshipping.
[Eller, 90] Well, —yes... she was seen as passé, condescended
to, and ignored rather than debated. But then, asks Eller, why did earlier
archaeologists who proposed prehistoric goddess veneration, and even powerful
priestesses, retain a high standing in their field? A puzzling question:
Who does she mean, what did they have to say, and why are they missing
from her historiography of the subject?
Eller appears to be referring to O.G.S. Crawford, Gordon
Childe, and Jacquetta Hawkes. The first two held back from interpreting
symbolism in megalithic European sites for several decades, while the
anthropological reaction against “matriarchy” was still fresh.
By 1938 Hawkes was chafing under her seniors’ admonitions to withhold
her ideas about a widespread megalithic goddess: “caution has been
enjoined and it must be observed.” [Hutton, 1996, 94] Hawkes broke
her silence in 1945 with a book describing the megalith builders as worshippers
of the Great Goddess, a religion she envisioning as spreading to western
Europe from the Balkans and Canaan via the Mediterranean. By the 1950s,
Crawford, Childe, and Glyn Daniel also advanced theories of a neolithic
goddess religion across Europe and west Asia. Ideas about an era of goddess
veneration became widespread in the early 1960s, when James Mellaart excavated
Çatal Höyük.
Although
Eller is reticent about it, it seems clear that another wave of “matriarchal”
theory swept through in the mid-20th century, this time in the field of
archaeology. It appears to have been fueled by the realization, as a result
of many 20th century digs, that neolithic iconography was predominantly
female. The Myth only acknowledges this second wave once, obliquely, by
including a 1963 quote from Jacquetta Hawkes: “there is every reason
to suppose that under the conditions of the primary Neolithic way of life
mother-right and the clan system were still dominant.... Indeed, it is
tempting to be convinced that the earliest Neolithic societies throughout
their range in time and space gave woman the highest status she has ever
known.” [History of Mankind, quoted in Eller, 34]
<<< Mohenjo-Daro, Indus valley
But by the late 60s, a reaction had set
in against interpreting female images as goddesses (or as having any sacral
power). The “New Archaeology” turned away from cultural analysis
to an emphasis on scientific process and technology. The trend was simply
to ignore the female figurines, although they were often classified in
passing as “fertility idols,” “dancing girls,”
“pretty ladies,” and “concubines.” Most were squirreled
away in obscure journals as tiny, poorly reproduced black-and-white shots,
while warriors got full-page color treatment in The Dawn of Man-type
coffee table books. There was more than a reluctance to call them goddesses;
details were typically omitted about the sites where they were discovered,
and in what contexts, even about dates. Most readers did not notice this
blank gap amidst the extensive analysis of weapons and tool assemblages:
how is it possible to evaluate information that's withheld? Such structural
omissions are by no means a thing of the past. Amnon Ben Tor’s survey
of Israeli archaeology is a paradigmatic example of this studied inattention.
[Ben Tor, 1992]
Other than Gimbutas, Eller claims,
no other archaeologists support the “matriarchal myth.” This
is easily disproven by naming a few: Gro Mandt of the University of Bergen;
Jiao Tianlong and Du Jinpeng of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences; Kristina Berggren of the Swedish Institute
of Classical Studies in Rome; and Jeanine Davis-Kimball of UC-Berkeley,
who excavated the famous “Amazon” burials of the Sauromatians
at Pokrovka. The range of opinions is not as monolithic as The Myth portrays.
Davis-Kimball, for example, has said, “I think Gimbutas may have
been wrong about the mother goddess per se. But she may have been right
about an underlying, unbroken tradition of female cultic power and wisdom,
which has been suppressed since the Middle Ages and especially since the
Industrial Revolution.” [in Osborne, 1997]
Eller writes that most feminist archaeologists
and anthropologists are critical of the popular trend toward interpreting
the wealth of ancient female images as goddesses. Unfortunately, we don't
hear from them directly. [I found that Eller relied heavily on the work
of Tringham and Conkey. See their article “Rethinking Figurines:
A Critical View from Archaeology of Gimbutas, the ‘Goddess’
and Popular Culture,” 1999] There’s no question that the dominant
paradigm in archaeology is hostile to interpreting the ubiquitous female
figurines as having sacred significance, whether that be as goddesses
or maternal ancestors, and to matristic interpretations of prehistory.
Or rather, it may be more accurate to say that it is American and English
archaeologists who reject these interpretations, since much more sympathetic
views are found among archaeologists in other countries, for example:
Shashi Asthana [1985], Pierre Cauvin [2000], and Danny Youkana [1997]
(Continued) ............................................. NEXT ------>
Whose Interpretation?
Deconstructing "Matriarchal Myth"
Where's the History?
Arguing About the Goddess
PoMo Prescriptions
Copyright 2000 Max Dashu