Marija Gimbutas

Marija Gimbutas 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. Born in Vilnius, she fled Lithuania before the advancing Soviet army and moved to the United States, where she was professor at UCLA from 1963 to 1989 and directed excavations of Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe. Her Goddess books described a goddess-centred Old Europe supplanted by patriarchal Kurgan invaders; mainstream archaeology dismissed these later works, while three genetic studies in 2015 gave support to her Kurgan theory.