@nyx so there are basically thee parts to her imfamy that are in anyway rooted in things she said:

1. the claim that there were for thousands of years relatively peaceful communitarian agricultural peoples living in east, central, southern and northern europe and middle east that were invaded in the 3rd millennium BC by pontic steppe that were cattle herders, aristocratic, patriarchal, war-making and engaged in mass human and animal sacrifice and that this lead to the subordination of women, the focus on animal grazing and domestication, the development of competitive aristocratic hierarchies and warrior caste elevation, creating most of what we think of as european culture and society

2. these neolithic societies are matriarchal

3. these pre-patriarchal middle eastern and european cultures shared a common pantheon ruled by a singular goddess

and in basic order, i would say that shes probably basically right about the first part, but it was many different societies with many different ways of organizing, and there is good dna evidence for her thesis being correct that a wide scale invasion is what fundamentally upset that order. This was the main focus of attacking her other claims of goddess matriarchal societies against here from academic sources, but with dna analysis done (i just checked it was done by by Haak in 2015) its very likely the case that this is corrrect.

2. She never argues, anywhere, for the exsitence of neolithic matriarchies. What she argued for is the exsistence of women having independence in social structuring and independent councils. this is sorta conjecture- in that we dont have exactly surviving records that can definitively prove this. however, we also dont have anythigng that would indicate male power being a thing until after the times of invasion, and plenty to suggest women having meaningful status. she never ment "singular rule of women heads of family over men" and instead meant "women having direction over self and group resources" or autonomy, essentialy. this is actually pretty common in societies without male hierarchal power, even if its rare in the records of the last couple hundred years. She gets accused of just inventing from pure fantastical conjecture, but she is drawing cross comparison from egalitarian cultures and noticing similarities.

3. this is the most contentious-- i think the most glaring is the idea of a shared pantheon or singular goddess. her main argument is the immense similarity between feminine figures and ritual between cultures. This both feels like the most speculative to me, but also we know that the long running presumption that these peoples were not in contact has been shown to be false, and there are many cross cultural similarities that are difficult to conceptualize as happening without shared exchange- such as shared goddesss veneration of meteorites or shared medicinal plant cultivation that are useful abortificants -- or the cultivation of licorice (an androgen suppresor) across this region, which roman historians connected with "castrated priestesses" devoted to the goddesses. this seems like pure projection from monotheistic bias to me. But, this area of research is very very intresting to me.

another part of her infamy comes from her theses being bastardized into lots of claims she never made, but in responding to her academics have very often responded to both woo spiritualist new age interpretations of her second hand as tho they were the exact same thing she said

i big part of what she gets condemed for is the fact that she is explicitly drawing up big picture narratives of meaning making from historical details to derive insights-- but, and anyone with a critical eye to cultural studies of any kind knows this-- this is litteraly always what is happening to some degree in any speculative work, it simply isn't as controversial when the built narritive is one that is socially challenging.

even if one takes it as true that gimbutas work is more myth making that rooted in exact fact, the way any single connection of social structures and development of patriarchy and social heirarchies generaly has been ruled out from ever being a possible question is rooted in so many layers of lash back against her actual work in such a way that is clearly more about how uncomfortable it makes certain naturalized assumptions than any real critique, and has created a certain game of catc-22 where if you acknowledge that there seem to be cultures where patriarchal heriarchies were not present due to their social structures making it difficult for such forms to develop, then your doing ''nobel savage" arguments, but if you dont take their social structure on their own terms then your brining in western notions of gender and power- making it impossible to look at the similarities and connections between less hierarchical cultures. and if one of those connections happens to be rooted in understandings of the metaphyical relations of the world that lead to and derive from womens autonomy and power then your doing woo crazy goddess matriarchy, like gimbutas, and no amount of facts can save you

basically she is the original person pointing out that there seems to be something connected to the development of patriarchy and hierarchy with the change in social structure and that there is good reason to suspect that women had autonomy in communitarian arrangements for thousands of years and this correlated with a meaningful goddess tradition.

i definitely internalized something in this connection between domestication, civilization and patriarchal hierarchy and had to take it apart and put it back together several times. it is an enormous challenge to a biological basis to patriarchy, rather than the determinations of social structure that is reformating pre-exstant bio-social conditions, but its interesting to look at how the implicit instability of that leads to smuggling in the possibility of undoing it (and the very slow destruction of the actual biological material of the patriarchal forms ;) ), pointing to the similarity between past and future methods of making common and woman's autonomy