I often encounter opposition in Indo-European papers to Gimbutas which smells like gender bias. They don’t like a woman ‘interfering’ in their yard. And a ‘woman’ whose genius (and hard work in the fields of linguistics and archaeology) solved a puzzle that had been unsolved since Indo-European languages were discovered in 1786: where is the homeland.
Source: Twitter (@DecodingTrolls)
The gender lens applied to scholarship itself. Marija Gimbutas — the Lithuanian-American archaeologist who identified the Yamnaya as proto-Indo-Europeans and documented Old Europe’s female-worshipping culture — faced resistance that “smells like gender bias.” A woman solved the oldest puzzle in Indo-European studies, and the field’s response was to diminish her. The same patriarchal pattern operates in the academy as in geopolitics.
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