Background to Marija Gimbutas

Prehistory is our history before the written word. Those who pursue its knowledge are often self-taught, since it has not been recognized as a course of study in most academic circles.

Academics are generally comfortable with beginning humankind's history around 3,000 BCE, when the Sumerian civilization along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in today's Iraq invented an alphabet and made great strides as a civilization. Yet humankind left its mark for future generations many millennium before this in the form of assorted symbols. Despite this, academics (including most archeologists) persist in doubting or dismissing conclusions that might be drawn from the prolific symbols common in prehistory. This also solves the potential conflict with traditional religious history, which can be damaging to career advancement.

Occasionally, an academic takes exception to the norm, and they usually find their audience elsewhere than the ivory tower. This is the case with the temples of Malta. These monuments communicate in the universal languages of mathematical measurements of stars and seasons, and their words are expressed in the universal picture language of dreams. It does not require extensive education to see the Malta artifacts as representations of Mother Earth, symbolizing rebirth in the cycle of life and death.

Documenting that these patterns could be found repeatedly elsewhere in old Europe and that they informed the existence of the first agricultural or Neolithic cultures was the life work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921 - 1994).

Gimbutas' radical interpretations came under attack, but she did not believe it possible to understand Neolithic cultures without recognizing the significance of their spirituality. Gimbutas' believed that one the great events in prehistory was the creation of villages made possible by efficiency of growing crops, thereby relieving humans from the uncertainty and immediacy of being hunter-gatherers.

Marija Gimbutas' work in explaining the symbols the symbols of Old Europe fell on deaf ears at the infamous 1985 Malta Archaeological Conference, but resonated with thousands of people around the world.

An Florida organization (otsf.org) devoted to the preservation Malta's neolithic temples tells of a forthcoming IMAX movie which sees the archeological evidence as the door to "a new chapter in the story of human development using the ancient monuments still standing on Malta as a threshold to prehistory. "