Paper short abstract:

Simple narratives have always been part and parcel of prehistory, the study of the deep past. The emergence of prehistory in the 19th century was intimately linked with the rise of European nation-states. By the time of the First World War there were already two models for the emergence of ‘civilization’ in Europe: a stadial one, emphasizing universal progress from simple to complex societies, and a spatial one, with cores radiating to peripheries. The latter model appealed to historical particularists, including diffusionists and migrationists.

Paper long abstract:

In this contribution, I want to examine what happened to particularist models of cultural expansion after the Second World War, in the context of the Cold War. While archaeology and anthropology both turned away from historical narratives of chosen people roaming prehistory, for instance so-called ‘Indo-Europeans’ or ‘Aryans’, tales of proto-Nordic indo-European-speaking invaders from the Pontic-Caspian steppes destroying ‘Old Europe’ started to re-emerge in North America, under the influence of Lithuania-born Harvard researcher Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). Marginalized by archaeologists, Gimbutas’s theories nevertheless found support among the linguists, comparative mythologists and structural anthropologists, including Greimas, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss.

Gimbutas’s intellectual trajectory from Hitler-style invasionism to Flower Power in the 1960s is remarkable; she is still widely credited for the discovery of a shift from matrifocal societies in the Neolithic to patriarchal ones in the Bronze Age. Today her theories are coming back to archaeology through genetics and linguistics, which claim to have found the ‘homeland’ of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Through the extraordinary life and work of Marija Gimbutas I hope to show how knowledge of the deep past has proceeded in cycles and perhaps never quite left the realm of mythology.