"During the last few years of his life, Joseph Campbell spoke frequently of Marija Gimbutas, profoundly regretting that her research on the Neolithic cultures of Europe was not available during the 1960's 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."
The prodigious accomplishments of Marija Gimbutas include the publication of nearly twenty books and over three hundred articles on European prehistory. The texts published between 1946 and 1971 earned her reputation as a world-class specialist on the Indo-European Bronze Age as well as on Lithuanian folk art and the prehistory of the Balts and the Slavs. Her last three books, however, have stimulated vigorous responses from both the academic and lay communities throughout the world. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974, 1982), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) reveal an interpretation of European prehistory that challenges many traditional assumptions about the beginnings of European civilization."
~ Pacifica Graduate Institute