Marija Gimbutas
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982)
"Gimbutas was largely concerned witht rying to understand the broad contours of a cultural tradition she referred to as 'Old Europe,' a world of settled Neolithic villages centering on the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean [...] Old Europe, by her estimation, endured from roughly 7000 BC to 3500 BC"
an "essentially peaceful" culture in which "men and women were equally valued, and differences of wealth and status were sharply circumscribed"
"According to Gimbutas, 'Old Europe' came to a catastrophic end in the third millenium BC, when the Balkans were overrun by a migration of cattle-keeping people--the so-called 'kurgan' folk--originating on the Pontic steppe"
"The incoming groups where aristocratic and 'androcratic' (i.e. patriarchal) [...] Gimbutas considered them responsible for the westward spread of Indo-European languages, the establishment of new kinds of societies based on the radical subordination of women, and the elevation of warriors to a ruling caste"
Haak et al. 2015 suggests that the kurgan hypothesis is "magnificently vindicated" by ancient DNA (560) // "there really was an expansion of herding peoples from the grasslands north of the Black Sea around the time Gimbutas believed it to have happened: the third millennium BC" (218)
an explanation, at last, for "how hierarchy and exploitation came to take root in the domestic sphere"
synthesize with Graeber's own argument, in Debt, and Gerda Lerner's Creation of Patriarchy (cited in Debt)