“The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe”

The key work of the third and the most creative stage of Gimbutas’ research career, is The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, which was published in English in 1991.  This study also came out in the Lithuanian language in 1996, in a briefer form.  Even though in this research Gimbutas leaned perhaps too much towards the vision of the ideal prehistory of Europe, her study differed from those by prominent Western-thinking scholars working in Oxford, Cambridge, or other European and American universities, in one crucial aspect. 

Marija Gimbutas, who herself was of the Eastern European origin, and knowledgeable in regional materials and languages, did not view Europe, its prehistory, and history in general, as ending at the western border of Poland.  She presented materials on Southeastern, Northwestern and Eastern Europe, including the region populated by the Balts, in suitable proportion to the materials on Western Europe.  This was in part owing to her erudition, which was far superior to that of other authors now writing similar books, some of them on commission from the European Union.  These authors, unfortunately, struggle even with the great Slavic languages, not even mentioning Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Romanian, and other languages of this region.

Adomas Butrimas
(After: Butrimas, Adomas. Marija Alseikaitė-Gimbutienė – baltų archeologijos tyrėja (Marija Alseikaitė-Gimbutas, a Researcher in Baltic Archaeology). Lituanistica, 2012, t. 58, nr. 1 (87), p. 8)