Joan Marler (1947) – I was raised along the coast of northern California where I developed a passion for the wild beauty of the Pacific Ocean and a deep kinship with the redwood forest where I grew up. I came out of the woods in 1969 to study dance and the liberal arts at Mills, the earliest women’s college in the San Francisco Bay area.

During the 1980s I created a weekly program, Voices of Vision on KPFA, the historic non-commercial radio station in Berkeley California. I interviewed many remarkable women who represented a burgeoning women’s spiritually movement. When I interviewed the Lithuanian American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas my life was changed forever.
Marija invited me to work as the editor of The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. She defined “Old Europe” as the foundation of European Civilization, before the arrival of patriarchal tribes from the Eurasian steppes. Moreover, Marija described Goddess, in her magnificent multiplicity, as all life, death, and regeneration in nature. My initial process of coming to understand her pioneering work and having the opportunity to discuss it with her, transformed my vision of the world.
I treasured the experiences of traveling internationally with Marija during the seven years we worked together and I recorded her stories along the way. On several occasions she asked me to lecture for her when she was not well enough to do so. Her death was mourned by people throughout the world, and many creative activities took place in her honor. I will mention, From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas, 1997, which I assembled and edited. To my surprise, it was featured in a two-day symposium at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. The Institute of Archaeomithology, with its international conferences and publications, was also established in Marija’s honor.
I continued my studies by earning an MA in Archaeomithology and a PhD in Philosophy and Religion. I taught in the Women’s Spirituality Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies and lectured internationally on the life and work of Marija Gimbutas. My doctoral dissertation, Marija Gimbutas’s Contributions to Archaeology, and the Reactions Within Her Field, received the 2025 Kore Award from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology.
May Marija Gimbutas’s profound gifts remind us that male dominance is a recent aberration and we are inseparable from the essence of the living world.