Having fled Lithuania with her family in 1944, she continued her studies at the universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen. In 1942, she graduated from Vilnius University in Lithuanian studies, ethnology and archaeology. She was born on 23 February 1921 in Vilnius and attended the Ausra girls’ gymnasium in Kaunas from 1931 to 1938. Yet things were not always easy for immigrants and the fate of Marija Gimbutas should be seen as an exception rather than the rule among such people.

The US has long been seen as a country of boundless possibilities: a land where dreams come true a place that makes everyone free to become what he or she wishes. Her book The Balts, first published in 1963, remains the most popular introduction to the Baltic heritage worldwide. A professor of Harvard and California Universities, this most famous of Lithuanian scholars addressed many questions that remain important in the twenty-first century, and was a dedicated advocate of the Lithuanian spirit. The prize has been awarded in the United States since 1935 for the most outstanding research in the history of world culture. In 1991, she received the Anisfield-Wolf prize for her book The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe published in that year. She explored Baltic mythology in depth and, having revealed the merits of the matricentric – what she called “matristic” – culture became an icon of feminist ideology. 1 Having opened the door to the archaeological past of “Old Europe”, she built a unique methodology for which she coined the term archaeomythological. Like the goddess of light she describes in her work, she is acclaimed, respected, even adored.

One of the most renowned US archaeologists, Lithuanian-born Marija Alseikaite-Gimbutas (1921-94), created her own myth of extraordinariness. Most important, let us not cut off the bonds with the spiritual past of our nation. She was the only twentieth-century scholar to have discovered and described an entire, unrecognized civilization. Marija Gimbutas was the luckiest of scholars.

The Living Goddesses by Marija Gimbutas