In further response to your correspondent who gangs up with the boys in sneering at Professor Gimbutas, may I suggest this article. It is very materialistic (which is the only way you get to be "respectable" in patriarchal academia) but it makes it very clear how the hatchet job on Prof. Gimbutas was done, how little basis it had in fact, and how much it rested on the boys' club applying very different standards to a female archaeologist (especially one who dared to challenge patriarchal orthodoxy) than those applied to male archeologists. It also makes it quite clear that the supposed "discrediting of matriarchy" was nothing more than a reshuffling of concepts and a change in academic fashion, and that the facts of the almost total dominance of female images in pre-historic societies remain unchanged. Thank you for this. We would also add that the frequent claims that the huge preponderance of female figurines "were not divine" shows an incredible degree of parochialism. No civilisation other than the modern west (and to a lesser extent its predecessor the "classical" world) has ever been a "secular society". What possible warrant can there be for modern Westerners projecting this particular historical oddity of their own onto every ancient society with a preponderance of feminine imagery - which amounts to thousands of cultures over many times the duration of the entire history of patriarchy? The arrogance, and the sheer small-town ignorance of the rest of humanity, is astonishing.

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UPDATE: We wish to make it clear that when we said that we do not accept the Kurgan hypothesis, we were not simply dismissing Prof. Gimbutas's very erudite findings. We leave that particular debate to (unprejudiced) specialists in the field. What we meant was that we do not accept the popular projection of her theory that attributes patriarchy in general to the mad, bad Kurgan invaders. Clearly this cannot be true as patriarchal revolutions are documented to have taken place all over the world. Nor do we believe that the ancient Indo Europeans were inherently patriarchal. As with all humans, their patriarchy was a late development and the Indo-European tradition, like all others, is originally Deanic.