Mother Goddess - Old Europe

Old Europe

James Frazer (author of The Golden Bough) and others (such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Robert Graves and Marija Gimbutas) advance the idea that goddess worship in ancient Europe and the Aegean was descended from Pre-Indo-European neolithic matriarchies. Gimbutas argued that the thousands of female images from Old Europe (archaeology) represented a number of different groups of goddess symbolism, notably a "bird and snake" group associated with water, an "earth mother" group associated with birth, and a "stiff nude" group associated with death, as well as other groups. Gimbutas maintained that the "earth mother" group continues the paleolithic figural tradition discussed above, and that traces of these figural traditions may be found in goddesses of the historical period. According to Gimbutas' Kurgan Hypothesis, Old European cultures were disrupted by expansion of Indo-European speakers from southern Siberia.

In 1968 the archaeologist Peter Ucko proposed that the many images found in graves and archaeological sites of Neolithic cultures were toys. The graves he was describing dated from Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete, and mostly, contained adults, however.