Editing Marija Gimbutas (section)

=== Education and academic appointments ===
From 1936, Gimbutas participated in [[ethnography|ethnographic]] expeditions to record traditional folklore and studied Lithuanian beliefs and rituals of death.<ref name="WareBraukman234" /> 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. She then attended the [[University of Vilnius]] to pursue graduate studies in archaeology (under [[Jonas Puzinas]]), linguistics, ethnology, folklore and literature.<ref name="WareBraukman234" />

In 1942 she completed her master's thesis, "Modes of Burial in Lithuania in the Iron Age", with honors.<ref name="WareBraukman234" /> She received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1942.

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.<ref name="WareBraukman235" /><ref>[https://katalog.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/opac/RDSRecord/RDSDetails?id=010331530] {{dead link|date=March 2018|bot=InternetArchiveBot|fix-attempted=yes}}</ref> She often said that she had the dissertation under one arm and her child under the other arm when she and her husband fled the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, in the face of an advancing Soviet army in 1944.

From 1947 to 1949 she did postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Munich.

After arriving in the United States in the 1950s, Gimbutas immediately went to work at [[Harvard University]] translating Eastern European archaeological texts. She then became a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. In 1955 she was made a Fellow of Harvard's [[Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology|Peabody Museum]]. As a woman scholar, Gimbutas was banned from using Harvard's library which was reserved for men only. This was a factor in her leaving Harvard for  UCLA.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

Gimbutas then taught at UCLA, where she became Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies in 1964 and Curator of Old World Archaeology in 1965.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/results.php?d=1&first=Marija&last=Gimbutas|title=Women in Old World Archaeology|website=Brown.edu|access-date=7 August 2018}}</ref>  In 1993, Gimbutas received an honorary doctorate at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}