Lietuvos archeologija / Lithuanian Archaeology

The Indian subcontinent has been one of the regions of the world where the worship of goddesses has been amongst the most longstanding. The seminal work of Marija Gimbutas on the Neolithic and Copper Age settlements of southeastern Europe and particularly her explorations into the feminine forms of the period as possible expressions of Goddess worship have implications for the material culture of the Indian subcontinent in ways that have perhaps not been adequately addressed. Equally, insights into some of the surviving trajectories of rituals and iconographies of goddess worship might serve to throw more light on enigmatic aspects of archaeological finds including from the Neolithic, not just in the context of the subcontinent but elsewhere in antiquity. The paper also sets out to explore the place of the dancing form in ritual particularly with respect to goddess worship, which emerged as a more distinctive feature of Indian antiquity than in many other parts of the world.

Marija Gimbutas (Gimbutienė) is a renowned archaeologist who specialised in European prehistory. This paper explores her life and work, including her personal biography, showing how her upbringing in Lithuania shaped her academic interests and orientations. This paper also reviews her professional achievements and contributions via the lenses of seven aspects of her academic life, namely her time in higher education, her work on Lithuanian folklore and symbolism, her explorations of Old Europe during the Neolithic, her Kurgan Hypothesis and engagement with Baltic studies, her excavations in southeast Europe, her work on the Goddess, and her symbolism work. It also examines academic and popular reactions to her writing and her influence on scholars and public discourse.

We present a unified model for the movement of agricultural frontiers based on the construction of the parallax shift and its relation to normalizable science. The model is based on data from the Baltic Basin, where for thousands of years, complex and semi-complex hunter/gatherer/fishers and agriculturalists remained in an equilibrium state. When agriculturalization occurred, it occurred in a punctuated

Šventoji 43 is one of eight Comb Ware culture sites known in Lithuania at present. The site was excavated in 2013 and 2014 and revealed a homogeneous pottery assemblage, which was classified as Comb Ware and was radiocarbon dated to 3900–3650 cal BC. As a result of this dating, it has been found that Comb Ware is the oldest pottery type to have been produced in coastal Lithuania. In fact, the pottery assemblage of Šventoji 43 also suggests that Comb Ware originates from a distinct phase in the pottery sequence of coastal Lithuania that both predates all other phases from Šventoji pottery bearing sites and has not been previously recognised in other assemblages. Zooarchaeological analysis has revealed that the site was occupied during the early spring and mostly used for fishing zander and pike in the lagoonal lake and for hunting seals and forest game. The unique character of the flint industry, which combined hard hammer percussion and bipolar knapping that resulted in the production of microliths on irregular blades, suggests that the local Šventoji 43 community had Mesolithic roots. Furthermore, this evidence supports the hypothesis that Comb Ware had reached Lithuania through intense contact between East Baltic hunter-gatherers rather than due to a mass migration of the population from the Northeastern Baltic. The much wider distribution of Finno-Ugric hydronyms, compared to that of Comb Ware sites gives an impression that some other Subneolithic pottery types in addition to Comb Ware might have been produced by Finno-Ugric speaking people.