Gimbutas's parents were connoisseurs of traditional Lithuanian folk arts and frequently invited contemporary musicians, writers, and authors to their home, including Vydūnas, Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, and Jonas Basanavičius.

[3] With regard to her strong cultural upbringing, Gimbutas said:I had the opportunity to get acquainted with writers and artists such as Vydūnas, Tumas-Vaižgantas, even Basanavičius, who was taken care of by my parents.

One year after the birth of their daughter, the young Gimbutas family, in the face of an advancing Soviet army, fled the country to areas controlled by Nazi Germany, first to Vienna and then to Innsbruck and Bavaria.

[1] She graduated with honors from Aušra Gymnasium in Kaunas in 1938 and enrolled in the Vytautas Magnus University the same year, where she studied linguistics in the Department of Philology.

In 1946, Gimbutas received a doctorate in archaeology, with minors in ethnology and history of religion, from University of Tübingen with her dissertation "Prehistoric Burial Rites in Lithuania" ("Die Bestattung in Litauen in der vorgeschichtlichen Zeit"), which was published later that year.

As a Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies at UCLA from 1963 to 1989, Gimbutas directed major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe between 1967 and 1980, including Anzabegovo, near Štip, Republic of North Macedonia, and Sitagroi and Achilleion in Thessaly (Greece).

Digging through layers of earth representing a period of time before contemporary estimates for Neolithic habitation in Europe – where other archaeologists would not have expected further finds – she unearthed a great number of artifacts of daily life and religion or spirituality, which she researched and documented throughout her career.

The Goddess trilogy articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered (gynocentric), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it.

[citation needed] The androcratic, or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors.

Gimbutas's work, along with that of her colleague, mythologist Joseph Campbell, is housed in the OPUS Archives and Research Center on the campus of the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.

Campbell provided a foreword to a new edition of Gimbutas's The Language of the Goddess (1989) before he died, and often said how profoundly he regretted that her research on the Neolithic cultures of Europe had not been available when he was writing The Masks of God.

[22] Anthropologist Bernard Wailes (1934–2012) of the University of Pennsylvania commented to The New York Times that most of Gimbutas's peers[23] believe her to be "immensely knowledgeable but not very good in critical analysis.

[20] A standard textbook of European prehistory corroborates this point, stating that warfare existed in neolithic Europe and that adult males were given preferential treatment in burial rites.

He notes, for example, that early Egyptian figurines of women holding their breasts had been taken as "obviously" significant of maternity or fertility, but the Pyramid Texts revealed that in Egypt this was the female gesture of grief.