In the 1970s Marija Gimbutas shook the worlds of prehistoric European archaeology, feminist studies and peace history with a series of wide-ranging excavations, research reports and popular books. After decades digging the prehistoric remains of the Danube valley, mostly in modern Romania and western Ukraine, Gimbutas postulated a new theory: of “Old Europe.” [See Map.] Not the ancien regime or mythological Ur-realm of the northern European Aryans, but a distinct civilization linked directly to Anatolia and the Aegean. This civilization, lasting from c.6500 to c.3500 BCE, boasted permanent agricultural settlements — many far larger than anything in contemporary Mesopotamia — exquisitely sophisticated pottery, figurines, jewelry and metalwork in copper, and — most important for Gimbutas’ theory and its adherents — a nonviolent way of life marked by a distinct lack of weapon finds, walled towns or evidence of coercive social hierarchies. Central to this society was the worship of the Goddess, evidenced in myriad finds of statuettes of her various incarnations: fertility, mistress of animals, love, death. This “civilization of the goddess” gave its due to males, whose grave remains contain large numbers of prestige goods, but as a whole, if not matriarchal, it was clearly “matrifocal.”

All this came to a sudden end c.4100 BCE, when archaeological finds record hundreds of sites interrupted not by climate change, flood, or famine but by deliberate human destruction: fire and massacre. These disruptions were accompanied by the rapid overrunning of previously agricultural settlements by nomadic horsemen whose sheep soon grazed atop Old Europe’s ruined tells. Gimbutas was quick to associate this destruction with incursions of the Indo-Europeans and the replacement of the earth goddess cult with the sky cults that gave birth to the Greek and Roman pantheons.

Gimbutas’ findings have supported a generation of further research often critical but generally supportive of her grand synthesis. Feminists and peace researchers see evidence both of a time in (pre)history when war, violence and male aggression did not dominate and, as importantly, that history itself is not necessarily a process of continuous progress from savagery to civilization: it has its curves, ups and downs. Nothing is inevitable, genetic or atavistic about the human propensity toward organized violence. Gimbutas’ handsome coffee-table books worked their way into the public perception of this past and became an inescapable starting point for discussions of peace and nonviolence in prehistory.

Now, a new exhibition and splendid catalog from NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World reopens this issue as part of a far-ranging study of The Lost World of Old Europe. Experts from Romania, the US and elsewhere have contributed a series of maps, charts, drawings and interpretative essays to accompany the exhibit of pottery, jewelry, figurines and other daily artifacts. Its editor, David W. Anthony, offers the best assessment of the state of this particular question among others treated, accepting Gimbutas’ overall contribution and moderating her strong assertions of the identity and role of the full-hipped, decorated female figures on display. Gimbutas’ theory stands, though not without modification — or strong attack.

This comes from Douglass W. Bailey, whose strictly empirical methodology and world view does not allow for any inferences aside from the fact that these diminutive figurines were indeed common, that they seem to reconstruct some form of communal activity. He asserts that no one — lacking documentary evidence or definitive contextual finds — should draw any further conclusions (except that humans like to play with scale models). Nor should sound scholarship depend on our aesthetic or spiritual judgments.

Bailey’s points are well taken and necessary correctives to Gimbutas’ reading too much into such artifacts or relying on analogy to later mythological systems. Yet as noted art historian David Freedberg has demonstrated in a recent essay on the facial expressions of singers in Renaissance sculpture, neurological research has established that the human eye and mind does have the ability to interpret the evidence latent within works of art and to relate them to our most intimate and unspoken experiences: human art does mirror human life in more than surface markings. Further, Freedberg’s essay demonstrates that it is possible to support the fact of human “intuitions” with recent, empirical evidence. When Gimbutas and her colleagues see the power of these figurines they are not projecting feminist or any other ideology onto mute stones but drawing upon their human abilities to read, interpret and judge: skills — and scholarly responsibilities — that Bailey’s empiricist essay denies. We can make the mute stones speak: it is our professional training and experience that makes this speech approach the truth.