Product Description

The Living Goddesses crowns a lifetime of innovative, influential work by one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable scholars. Marija Gimbutas wrote and taught with rare clarity in her original--and originally shocking--interpretation of prehistoric European civilization. Gimbutas flew in the face of contemporary archaeology when she reconstructed goddess-centered cultures that predated historic patriarchal cultures by many thousands of years.
This volume, which was close to completion at the time of her death, contains the distillation of her studies, combined with new discoveries, insights, and analysis. Editor Miriam Robbins Dexter has added introductory and concluding remarks, summaries, and annotations. The first part of the book is an accessible, beautifully illustrated summation of all Gimbutas's earlier work on "Old European" religion, together with her ideas on the roles of males and females in ancient matrilineal cultures. The second part of the book brings her knowledge to bear on what we know of the goddesses today--those who, in many places and in many forms, live on.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319334 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-12
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 306 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Before her death from cancer in 1994, the pioneering archeologist Marija Gimbutas had nearly completed this book, a distillation of her life's work. After decades of scholarly research that shaped much of the field of pre-Indo-European archeology (7000-3000 B.C.), Gimbutas produced two copiously illustrated, oversized books accessible to a nonscientific audience, The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess. This final, smaller work illuminates the continuity between scores of religious symbols from the cultural flowering of Neolithic Old Europe in the fifth millennium B.C. to European folk cultures of the modern era. The first part concisely presents Gimbutas's discoveries and observations about imagery of goddesses and gods, symbols and signs, sacred script, temples, burial practices and social structure in Old Europe before 4400 B.C., and reveals the sophisticated degree of abstraction and artistry in the expression of the Old European cyclical sense of birth, maturation, death and regeneration. The second part traces the adaptations of these Old European elements into subsequent religious systems from the late Neolithic era to our own century. As in her previous work, Gimbutas's aesthetic and spiritual sensitivity adds a depth unusual in archeological writing. This book is a major contribution to cultural history, especially the history of religion; clearly no one but Gimbutas could have produced this masterful contribution to the archeomythology of Europe. Although Part One is generously illustrated with ink drawings of excavated artifacts, none appear in Part Two, as they had not been assembled before Gimbutas's death. Miriam Robbins Dexter, who edited the book, has added a helpful introduction plus a summary at the end of each chapter.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Gimbutas, a much-praised and consistently controversial archaeologist and scholar of religion, startled academia with her assertion of the realities of goddess-focused religion in preliterate Europe. This book, ably completed after Gimbutas's death by Dexter, was intended by her to be a popular treatment of her themes but also draws upon later findings. Wide-ranging and fascinating, The Living Goddesses should intrigue the curious and delight most feminist scholars. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Another contribution to the much-ballyhooed theory of matriarchal prehistory, by the late feminist pioneer Gimbutas (Archaeology/UCLA; Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, not reviewed). Gimbutas built a career around her controversial claims that before Indo-European warriors invaded around 4400 b.c., ``Old Europeans'' from Ireland to Italy enjoyed an agrarian, peaceful, goddess-worshiping existence. Their aesthetic standard was higher than that of other cultures of the period, with sophisticated architecture, complex linear language, and advanced farming techniques. Their religious rituals centered on birth and regeneration, with female reproductive images occupying prominent roles. Many archaeologists have criticized Gimbutas's techniques and interpretations, noting that she reads more into the physical evidence than is supportable. Are all circles eggs, for example, and is every triangle a pubic image? At times, Gimbutas's claims, which she reiterates in this volume, nearly completed before her death in 1994, border on the ridiculous, as when she argues that the bullgenerally a symbol of patriarchal dominancewas really a woman-centered image for the Old Europeans because the bull's head and horns resemble the female uterus and Fallopian tubes. The latter half of the book moves to a discussion of social structure, with Gimbutas maintaining that Old Europeans had much greater respect for women's rights than their Indo-European successors. However, Gimbutas sometimes engages in a circuitous logic, claiming at once that women were socially respected because Old Europeans worshiped the goddess and that they worshiped the goddess because women were already regarded so highly. Also, Gimbutas conflates all Neolithic cultures into one ``Old European'' entity, missing the diversity of religion and practice among them. The book is well-written, and much credit must be given to editor Dexter (a lecturer in womens studies at UCLA), for tying together Gimbutass last works in an eloquent manner. Full of intriguing possibilities, but Gimbutas's work is too wedded to theory and ideology, rather than to archaeological evidence, to be ultimately persuasive. (130 b&w illustrations, 1 map) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.