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Was ancient Europe a single culture united by goddess worship? Archaeologist
Marija Gimbutas, who died in 1994, certainly thought so, and stirred up ample
controversy during her life because of it. In Gimbutas’s The Living
Goddesses, the cult had its local variants, but a common thread bound all
those owl, snake and hedgehog goddesses together: the cycle of life, death and
rebirth. Contentious, certainly, but she assembled a mountain of evidence from
Europe’s prehistory, linking, for example, the clay statue of a fat woman
sleeping from Malta’s Hypogeum to the frog-like Sheela na Gigs of Ireland.
Miriam Robbins Dexter has put together Gimbutas’s last book from the material
she was working on up to a few weeks before her death—an attempt to weld
mythology to archaeology. Fascinating. Published by the University of California
Press, $35, ISBN 0520213939.