Marija Gimbutas

Her 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.

After Lithuania regained independence in 1918, Gimbutas's parents organized the Lithuanian Association of Sanitary Aid which 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.

Gimbutas's parents were connoisseurs of traditional Lithuanian folk arts and frequently invited contemporary musicians, writers, and authors to their home, including Vydūnas, Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, and Jonas Basanavičius.

With regard to her strong cultural upbringing, Gimbutas said:"I had the opportunity to get acquainted with writers and artists such as Vydūnas, Tumas-Vaižgantas, even Basanavičius, who was taken care of by my parents. When I was four or five years old, I would sit in Basanavičius's easy chair and I would feel fine. And later, throughout my entire life, Basanavičius's collected folklore remained extraordinarily important for me."

Marija Gimbutas (Marija Birutė Alseikaitė-Gimbutienė, ; January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994) 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 Birutė Alseikaitė to Veronika Janulaitytė-Alseikienė and Danielius Alseika in Vilnius, the capital of the Republic of Central Lithuania; her parents were members of the Lithuanian intelligentsia.

In 1931, Gimbutas settled with her parents in Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania.

After her parents separated that year, she lived with her mother and brother, Vytautas, in Kaunas.

Five years later, her father died suddenly.

At her father's deathbed, Gimbutas pledged that she would study to become a scholar: "All of a sudden I had to think what I shall be, what I shall do with my life. I had been so reckless in sports—swimming for miles, skating, bicycle riding. I changed completely and began to read."

From 1936, Gimbutas participated in ethnographic expeditions to record traditional folklore and studied Lithuanian beliefs and rituals of death.

She graduated with honors from Aušra Gymnasium in Kaunas in 1938 and enrolled in the Vytautas Magnus University the same year, where she studied linguistics in the Department of Philology.

She then attended the University of Vilnius to pursue graduate studies in archaeology (under Jonas Puzinas), linguistics, ethnology, folklore and literature.

During the Second World War, Gimbutas lived under the Soviet occupation (1940–41) and then the German occupation (1941–43).

In 1941, she married architect Jurgis Gimbutas.

Gimbutas' first daughter, Danutė, was born in June 1942.

One year after the birth of their daughter, 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.

In her reflection of this turbulent period, Gimbutas remarked, "Life just twisted me like a little plant, but my work was continuous in one direction."

While holding a postdoctoral fellowship at Tübingen the following year, Gimbutas gave birth to her second daughter, Živilė.

In 1942 she completed her master's thesis, "Modes of Burial in Lithuania in the Iron Age", with honors.

She received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1942.

She 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.

In 1946, Gimbutas received a doctorate in archaeology, with minors in ethnology and history of religion, from University of Tübingen with her dissertation "Prehistoric Burial Rites in Lithuania" ("Die Bestattung in Litauen in der vorgeschichtlichen Zeit"), which was published later that year.

From 1947 to 1949 she did postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Munich.

In the 1950s, the Gimbutas family left Germany and relocated to the United States, where Gimbutas had a successful academic career.

After arriving in the United States in the 1950s, Gimbutas immediately went to work at Harvard University translating Eastern European archaeological texts.

She then became a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology.

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).

In her work she reinterpreted European prehistory in light of her backgrounds in linguistics, ethnology, and the history of religions, and challenged many traditional assumptions about the beginnings of European civilization.

Her third daughter, Rasa Julija, was born in 1954 in Boston.

In 1955 she was made a Fellow of Harvard's Peabody Museum.

In 1956 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 (PIE) speaking peoples, whom she dubbed the "Kurgans"; namely, to account for their origin and to trace their migrations into Europe.

This hypothesis, and her method of bridging the disciplines, has had a significant impact on Indo-European studies.

As a Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies at UCLA from 1963 to 1989, Gimbutas directed major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe between 1967 and 1980, including Anzabegovo, near Štip, Republic of Macedonia, and Sitagroi and Achilleion in Thessaly (Greece).

Digging through layers of earth representing a period of time before contemporary estimates for Neolithic habitation in Europe – where other archaeologists would not have expected further finds – she unearthed a great number of artifacts of daily life and religion or spirituality, which she researched and documented throughout her career.

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, Gimbutas received an honorary doctorate at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Gimbutas died in Los Angeles in 1994, at age 73.

Soon afterwards, she was interred in Kaunas's Petrašiūnai Cemetery.