Signs Out of Time in Gimbutas’ Old Europe - The Goddess Remembered

Signs Out of Time is a documentary on archeologist Marija Gimbutas, who found that Europe's origins lay in a cooperative, peaceful, neolitihic Goddess culture. A film by Donna Read ("The Goddess Remembered") and Starhawk, narrated by Olympia Dukakis.

 " The Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas
 Portraying the life and works of one of the most prolific archaeologists of the twentieth century is a daunting undertaking. Compressing it into a one-hour documentary seems well-nigh impossible. That they succeed is a tribute to the understanding and film-making skills of Donna Read and Starhawk. A decade after their collaboration on the "Goddess and Spirituality" trilogy, the two team up to present this film-biography of one of the true prophets of our hidden past. A long-running prejudice of historical studies holds that civilization and written language were born together in the ancient Middle East amid an orgy of empire-building. Some of the oldest extant writings record the exploits of conquering kings. Gimbutas challenged this view by showing three things: First, that Neolithic urban settlements greatly pre-dated the "first cities" of the patriarchal tradition; Second, that at least some of these settlements had no defensive walls, no military burials, and no artwork recording warfare; Third, that the decorative designs of the artwork of these cultures may actually be a sophisicated system of symbols through which ideas and values could be recorded and transmitted.

  Biography and Teachings
 Signs Out of Times surveys Gimbutas's life and early academic career, in which she combined an interest in folklore with a deep knowledge of European languages. This combination helped open insights that remained closed to scholars whose cultural focus was classically formed, and whose standard of "language" was Latin or Greek. Against the backdrop of her life, the film turns to Gimbutas's theories about language and symbolism in Old Europe. Her conjectures sometimes seem far-fetched, as when she states that two spirals are in fact snakes coiling into two divine eyes (see graphic on page 63). But once we see some of the dozens or hundreds of similar pieces that Gimbutas studied - some naturalistic, others more abstract - the common symbolism becomes clear. From this discovery to the view that the symbols form a variegated system of interlocking meanings capable of carrying complex ideas and traditions is still quite a leap, and many scolars have rejected Gimbutas's theories. Even some of her admirers consider her views "outdated" and of "suggestive power" only. But during the last few years of his life, the great archaeologist and visionary historian Joseph Campbell spoke frequently of Marija Gimbutas, regretting that her research on the Neolithic cultures of Europe was not available during the 1960s when he was writing The Masks of God. Otherwise, he would have "revised everything." Campbell compared the importance of Marija's work to Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was not alone in this appreciation. According to anthropologist Ashley Montagu, "Marija Gimbutas has given us a veritable Rosetta Stone of the greatest heuristic value for future work in the hermeneutics of archaeology and anthropology."
 Read more on http://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/web/gimbutas/gimbutas1.html

Full Documentary on youtube

Part 2 : http://youtu.be/OmjghytJDtQ
Part 3: http://youtu.be/GCZHgRcrFIc
Part 4: http://youtu.be/kqpSYTz-68c
Part 5: http://youtu.be/h7oNZZKrsDI 
Part 6: http://youtu.be/nMxgOZPOHr4
Part 7: http://youtu.be/GKrVby1XNwg

 (DVD)Signs Out of Time: The Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (2003)


 Gimbutas’ Old Europe by By Deborah Barlow / Slow Muse

 Source: http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/tag/marija-gimbutas/

 "John Noble Wilford has written a fascinating article in the Science section of the New York Times (its location in the paper is telling) about an exhibit currently on view at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Entitled “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” the show includes more than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania. These treasures are being shown for the first time in the United States and will be on view through April 25. This is the culture that was of particular interest to the legendary archaeologist, mythologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. Two of her books have been on my shelves since they were first published—The Language of the Goddess (published in 1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess (from 1991). Introduced to her work by Stephanie Hobart and Deborah Rose, I was stunned by the exquisite images of artifacts that she included in her publications, the likes of which I had never seen before. Why was this culture so relatively unexplored, particularly when compared to our knowledge of Sumerian, Egyptian and Prehistoric Greek cultures? Part of Gimbutas’ explanation for this was encapsulated in her strong statements about who these people were. She promulgated a view that the culture of Old Europe was matristric (woman-centered), a term she invented, and that its stories were lost when androcratic (male-centered) cultures invaded the region. Her theories were controversial when she first made her case, and the controversy continues even now, 15 years after her death. That ongoing debate is referenced in Wilford’s review of the show as well:


An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. “It is not difficult to imagine,” said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people “arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones.” Others imagined the figurines as the “Council of Goddesses.” 

In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe. Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in “a shared understanding of group identity.” As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance: miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus “assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves.” 

Or else the “Thinker,” for instance, is the image of you, me, the archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a “lost” culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back before a single word was written or a wheel turned."