Marija Gimbutas and the World of Old Europe: A Documentary Summary

“What does the dance mean to the dancers? Do we measure the beliefs that set those feet in motion? What we believe about our past shapes our view of who we are as human beings and how we are capable of living. We can dream of a culture of harmony and peace in balance with nature. But has there ever been one? Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas has said yes. She told a new origin story.”

Signs Out of Time: The Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, written by Starhawk and directed by Donna Reed, opens with these words, and they stay with you. They suggest that a dance is never just a series of steps. It’s a memory, a ritual, a way of carrying belief through time. To ask what the dance means is to ask how people once lived and what they valued. And it reminds us: the stories we tell about our past shape the possibilities we imagine for our future. If we believe that war has always been at the centre of human life, then we can’t imagine anything else. But if evidence shows otherwise, then suddenly the horizon widens.

The first time many of us watch this film, there’s a sense of awakening, as if the ground shifts. We were raised to think history begins with kings, battles, and weapons. Yet here we are shown another possibility: that once, for thousands of years, people lived in flourishing cultures without signs of organised warfare.

The 2004 documentary guides us through the life and work of Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-born archaeologist whose journey took her from folksong collecting in her homeland, through exile during the Second World War, to Harvard University and later to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she became one of the most debated figures in archaeology

At the heart of the film is Gimbutas’ vision of “Old Europe.” Gimbutas studied Neolithic communities, 6500-3500 BCE, stretching across the Balkans and southeastern Europe. Excavations revealed permanent villages, ovens and bread platforms, woven textiles, exquisite pottery, and even the beginnings of metallurgy. What Gimbutas noticed most, however, was the absence of weaponry. No battle scenes. No fortresses. Instead: vessels painted with flowing symbols, clay figurines placed by hearths, graceful designs that spoke of something entirely different.

The camera lingers on those figurines, thousands of them. Spirals, chevrons, triangles, birds, snakes. Shapes pressed into clay with care, passed through fire, and kept in homes. To Gimbutas, they were not random decorations but part of a symbolic system she identified as “the language of the goddess.”

“The primordial deity for our ancestors was female, a self-generating goddess, giver of life, wielder of death and regeneratrix. She was the unity of all life in nature.”

It’s striking how simply she puts it: life, death, and renewal, all in one. For Gimbutas, these images revealed a worldview in which the sacred was woven into daily life: in baking bread, in weaving cloth, in the patterns scratched into clay. And she insisted this was never just about fertility.

“It is not about fertility. It is about regeneration, always. Out of every death, there is a rebirth. Always after an ending comes a new beginning.”

Not everyone agreed. Some scholars argued she read too much into the figurines, that calling them all “goddesses” risked projection. Yet the documentary shows why her work mattered: she was willing to look for meaning where others saw only meaningless fragments. She combined archaeology with mythology, folklore, and linguistics to ask bigger questions about belief, story, and culture.

The film also traces the turning point Gimbutas identified in her research. By the late fourth and third millennium BCE, waves of peoples from the eastern steppes, the Kurgans, as she called them, entered Europe. With them came horses, weapons, fortifications, and sky gods. In her interpretation, this encounter changed everything: myths shifted, societies stratified, the balance tipped. The peaceful villages of Old Europe gave way to a new order.

Woven through this journey through history are glimpses of Marija’s own life. She shared aspects of her childhood in Lithuania where she was warmly loved by her family. We learned of her deep affinity for her culture, and that she gathered folk songs as a young woman. She told an interviewer with wistful nostalgia that she witnessed men and women kissing the earth at dawn. When she visited her home country decades after being exiled by the war she was welcomed and honored for the breadth and sincerity of her life’s work. Dance, song, and ornament, for her, were living links between past and present, carriers of cultural memory.

Her later works, such as Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974) and The Language of the Goddess (1989), pulled her research together. They sparked both admiration and criticism, and the film doesn’t hide the debates. But it shows her courage in asking questions that few others dared to ask.

The documentary closes tenderly, with Marija’s ashes returned to Lithuania after her death in 1994. It leaves us not with answers, but with questions that come to us today again and again:

What if human history is not only the story of conquest and war, but also of long periods of peace and balance? What does it mean if our ancestors once lived in societies where art, ritual, and daily life were inseparable? How might our view of human nature change if regeneration, not domination, were at the centre of culture? What symbols, dances, or songs still carry fragments of those older stories into our present? And if such a world once existed, what does that say about the world we are capable of creating today?

For me, the answer to these questions is not only intellectual but deeply intuitive. Yes, I believe it is possible. The traces Marija Gimbutas uncovered, the figurines, the songs, the symbols, all point to a memory our bodies still hold. Watching this documentary feels like being reminded of something we have always known: that another way of living has existed before, and therefore, it can exist again.

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Photos Source: Signs Out of Time: The Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Directed by Donna Read and Starhawk, Belili Productions, 2004. Screenshot taken from YouTube video.

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