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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent book - great photos, drawings, commentary,
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This review is from: The Civilization of the Goddess (Paperback)
Marija Gimbutas presents a carefully researched, compelling and detailed composite portrait of the pre-Indo-European culture existing for 5,000 years up until about 5,000 years ago. Her greatest contribution is her willingness to NOT assume that things then must have been pretty much like they are now. That is, she explores with a much more open mind than most, what do the artifacts and patterns of housing and so on, tell us about that society? or, more accurately, that set of societies that prospered, growing larger, more creative and artistic, and more complex, over almost all of central and western Europe during that period of time? Marija illustrates beyond doubt that these societies were anything but "like" ours today, or even like the set of societies that conquered and replaced them for the next 5,000 years.The earlier social structures were centered on an understanding of the cycle of life: their villages were built with streets along concentric circles; their burials were in circular graves, their temples and worship were focused on the life giving aspect of the Goddess (her book includes photographs of hundreds of such artifacts), and in all of their thousands and thousands of pictures and artifacts, none -- not one -- were of war, fighting, or domination. Rather than a "Matriarchal" society where women dominate, Marija found a pattern of valuing women as were valued men, with villages of robust size -- 10,000 residents -- along trade routes. These societies fell easy prey to the domination of patriarchal and linear God-worshipping warriors on horseback that came out of what is now southern Russia around 5,000 years ago. Yet it took a few thousand of those years for nearly all the circular meaning of the growing of life to be pushed out. Interestingly, one might consider today's contemporary concern with sustainability to be a resurgence of that earlier understanding of the circular eternality of life -- this would account for a good deal of the resistance to sustainability by those most vested in the patriarchal linear dominance model we authoritatively embrace as "the only way" today.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Takes Commitment,
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This review is from: The Civilization of the Goddess (Paperback)
This book is very technically worded, it takes a couple chapters to get the hang of what Gimbutas is writing about. The images and maps are very instructive. With the exception of the intro to each chapter, a rather dry read. It ends with the three Kurgan invasions, but to find out what happens next you'll have to get the compilation of her articles on the Kurgans.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed Criticism,
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This review is from: The Civilization of the Goddess (Paperback)
I'm using several of Gimbutas' texts for a master's thesis that I'm working on and I have mixed criticisms about her works in general. This is one of her more complete texts, but it embodies every opinion I currently have about Marija Gimbutas and her work.First, I have to say that I'm impressed with Gimbutas for several reasons. She was relentless, or so it seems, in tracking down neolithic figurines. And she did a wonderful job describing them in each of her books. The drawings, photographs and written descriptions of figurine morphology are numerous. They are, however, inadequate in many regards. For instance, she includes a height of nearly all of them in this book, but few other metrics. But this can be forgiven since I'm probably one of a very few that is looking for this data. Luckily, she includes many, many sources throughout her books for where these figurines are curated, described, etc. So this makes tracking down additional information that much easier. One serious criticism I have for Gimbutas, however, is that she seems to go way overboard in assuming that so many of these represent "goddesses." Throughout this book (as well as her others) you can read where she assigns this or that figurine to an "owl goddess" or a "snake goddess," etc. In many, if not most cases the sex of the figurine isn't empirically obvious. In fact, in the few instance where she does actually say a figurine is male, it has a penis. If such obvious male genitalia are missing, she automatically refers to it as female. I think the danger of doing so, particularly when genitalia are missing, is that we fall victim of projecting our own modern biases regarding sex and gender on the prehistoric past. This is dangerous when done on cultures in the recent past and present, but even more so when done on cultures buried deep in time. There are some examples of figurines in this very book, from Malta for instance, where even my own first inclination is to think of the representation as being that of a woman. The individual depicted is overweight, and the arms, legs, hips, buttocks, breasts, etc. are proportionally obese. But there are no genitalia depicted. An obese man would present much the same characteristics! Further, even if the figurines depicted are representations of females, it seems to be to become yet another leap to automatically refer to them as "goddesses." These are cultures for whom writing is not yet invented, therefore we really don't know the purposes, uses, and various interpretations each figurine might represent. We can sometimes make some loose assumptions when their contexts are considered -figurines found in households might have household or domestic uses; figurines found in ritual contexts might have ritual uses. Either context could be representative of either divine being or human members of the culture. Still, Gimbutas' goddess hypothesis is thought-provoking, though I don't think it's as universally accepted as she would have liked it to be. Certainly there is evidence that some figurines are depictions intended for worship, implying a goddess (or god) in representation. But I really doubt that as many truly are as she describes. Her overall hypothesis might be wrong, but her texts still have value.
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