di Luciana Percovich
It was 1999 when I met Joan Marler in Milan, invited to participate in a conference, "The first roots of Europe: Stratifications, diffusive processes, clashes and encounters of cultures" (October 27-28, Sala delle Colonne in via San Paolo) . They spoke archaeologists, geneticists, linguists like Colin Renfrew, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, walter burkert, John Semerano, etc.
We had already been working in the women's movement for many years for a radical revolution in the perception and representation of the world, and meeting Marija Gimbutas, through the words of J. Marler, it was for me like suddenly feeling at home again. The series of slides that accompanied his intervention showed all the extraordinary beauty of the vases and statuettes of the European Neolithic, capable of transmitting the aura of an unimagined era of harmony and refined civilization, still intact. After the conference, I approached her to thank her and she gave me the book From the Realm of the Ancestors (1997) – the anthology she edited after Gimbutas's death three years earlier.
Reading that book put me in contact not only with Gimbutas' life and work, but also with the world of archaeologists and scholars of various disciplines who had worked with her or had been inspired in ways different from hers. trailblazer work. The vision introduced by Gimbutas, in fact, is much broader and more complex than what she normally holds for an archaeologist. She knew how to describe and support her interpretations of the material data of Neolithic societies, leading whoever read it directly into a world that had been forgotten until then, but which was there, from the very beginning, at the roots of human civilization. A world that survived, despite the deliberate destruction and the denial of her memory that lasted for several millennia, like an invisible texture on which layers and layers of different and divergent narratives had gradually deposited over time. Thanks to his solid professional training and her penetrating gaze, Gimbutas had been able to grasp its meaning and to describe the system of values and beliefs that had governed it from within.
The following year, in 2000, there was another important conference in Bologna, organized by the Armonie association, “The Myth and the Cult of the Great Goddess. Transits, metamorphoses, permanence”, this time all concentrated on the aspects of the Civilization of the Goddess. And then someone brought the videotape with the film made by Donna Read e Starhawk in 2003, for the Canadian producer Belili Productions, as a tribute to Marija Gimbutas to remember her 10 years after her death. Sandra Schiassi understood its significance and within a few months a first subtitling in Italian was created. And so it was that for some years my life was marked by a continuous travel around Italy in response to the requests that came from women's groups, bookshops, associations and cultural centers to project Signs out of time.
In the end, I knew by heart what the warm voice of Olympia Dukakis narrated, imprinting itself deeply in my thoughts and in my heart. I say "heart" because the life of Gimbutas and the images of the unearthed materials that returned to the eye after millennia triggered many emotions. I remember the reactions of many women from the "public", ranging from hugs with teary eyes and expressions of gratitude to a worried comment for the "poor daughters of Marija who must have suffered so much from their mother's absence going around digging up the graves" . None remained indifferent, because even before reaching the mind, vases, statuettes and various instruments with their archaic engraved or painted signs struck the unconscious.
Today, in this month of January 2021, in the surreal climate that seems to announce the reckoning of a civilization that risks going down in history as the Inhuman Age (otherwise known as the Anthropocene), we are launching a website that we have called Prehistory in Italy . One hundred years have passed since Marija's birth and we like to think that in doing so we can show our gratitude to the scholar and courageous woman (and to the makers of that film) through concrete action: to continue her work in Italy. As? Collecting, commenting and sharing in an easily accessible virtual place the information currently available about artifacts, places, sites and myths attributable to the layers of civilizations - peaceful and focused on feminine values of protection and care for life - that preceded the most famous cultures historical patriarchs. Over the millennia, our country, stretched out in the center of the Mediterranean, has known numerous passages of human groups who, in a constant movement between the continents, brought with them their own knowledge, habits and symbols. Their traces have remained on the territories they have crossed or where they have stopped and in our ancestral and genetic memories. However, it is a field of research that has so far found little recognition by academic archeology and which instead awaits a great deal of recovery work of the materials scattered in many different locations and classifications, in order to make possible a reorganization of what until now now it has been discovered but it has never been brought back to a coherent interpretative matrix.
The obscure and fragmented work of collecting the "finds" in Italy took place mostly during the 800th century, thanks to the interest of many passionate discoverers (all men, women did not have access to the education that males of families) in small towns and villages in the countryside, amateur archaeologists to whom various objects emerged mostly from plowed fields were brought. Materials often very damaged due to the repeated working of the fields and removed from the precise context of their discovery, often kept in private collections or in small museums scattered throughout the various regions, of which sometimes only the written reports remain in local magazines and of which in some cases only this trace now remains, as the artifacts disappeared once again or were taken and sold abroad (as in the case of the Balzi Rossi figurines or the Tabula di Rapino).
The site project was finally able to come to fruition when four women who were also capable of using web tools met (the site editors) and numerous other women linked together by a research network shared over the years in the various regions, attentive connoisseurs of their territories and willing to write about the little treasures of the places where they live. A site that starts flying from January 23, 2021 and that over time I imagine will be able to walk on its own and gradually take the most suitable forms to convey the memories of our past made invisible.
We decided to republish on this occasion the track I was following in the crowded presentations of the film and its contents. Signs out of time is currently available with more accurate subtitles by Cristina Sirka Capone and myself in the booklet with DVD published in 2013 by Psiche2 editions of Turin.
The following text is from 2005.
Luciana Percovich
