Registration Open: The Neolithic Matriverse
The Neolithic Matriverse: From Sacred Mother Worlds to Contemporary Erasure (0.5 Credit)
Course No: 409
Instructor: Dr. Danica Anderson
Time: TBA August 3-August 24 (Tuesdays, 2 hour-long 4 weekly sessions)
Description: This course examines the Neolithic Matriverse—maternal-centered cosmologies, social systems, and symbolic structures documented in the archaeological work of Marija Gimbutas, with
emphasis on Joan Marler’s anthology honoring her work. The course traces how matriversal systems were dismantled through patriarchal conquest, militarization, religious domination, and economic extraction, and how these ruptures continue to shape contemporary violence against women, transgenerational trauma, chronic survival states, and collapsing birthrates. Using Kolo-Informed Trauma, the course integrates feminist archaeology, biopsychology, social epigenetics, and biosemiotics.
Registration Available Now!
Mago Academy accepts registration for Spring 2026 Courses. For the list of Summer 2026 courses, see here.
If you want to register courses as your graduate degree program, go to Coursework Application Guides.
Fill out the form below and email to Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang (magoacademy@gmail.com) with the payment (Copy and paste the form in the body of your email). For other methods of payment, email Dr. Hwang for instructions. A Zoom link will be provided to registered students 2-3 days prior to the first session of your course.
1. Your name and country of residence:
2. Your email:
3. Affiliation or organization, if applicable:
4. Course(s) you are taking by the Course Number: e.g. 101 (1 credit)
5. Questions or comments:
Fee for 0.5 credit course toward M.A. or Ph.D. degree program: $350 (if you register for a total of 1 unit course, choose 2 in product quantity).
Fee for 1 credit course Audit: $100 (if you register for a 2 credit course auditing, choose 2 in product quantity)
Fee for 0.5 credit course Audit: $50 (if you register for a worth of 1.5 credit courses, e.g. one 1 credit course and 0.5 credit course, choose 3 in product quantity).
All inquires should be email to Dr. Hwang (magoacademy@gmail.com).
Course Summary
Rationale: Women and children are strategic targets of war, wealth accumulation, and political control. Their erasure under the category of ‘civilians’ conceals gendered and child-specific targeting. Drawing on international forensic traumatology work, this course examines how unpaid female labor, reproductive capacity, and caregiving roles are systematically exploited while their suffering is rendered invisible. The matriverse functioned as a social and biological regulatory system; its burial continues to shape trauma across generations.
Objectives: Participants will: define the Matriverse as a social, biological, and symbolic system; engage Marija Gimbutas’ work through Joan Marler’s scholarship; identify how patriarchal systems dismantled
maternal-centered cultures; connect Goddess symbolism to contemporary violence against women; apply Kolo-Informed Trauma to transgenerational trauma; recognize chronic survival states as biological outcomes of social rupture.
Instructor: Danica Anderson Ph.D. in USA
Biography: Danica Anderson, Ph.D., BCFT, FAAETS, DAAETS, is a forensic traumatologist, social scientist, and founder of The Kolo: Women’s Cross-Cultural Collaboration. Her fieldwork across Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Sri Lanka centers the forensic study of women’s war trauma, social epigenetics, and the transmission of embodied memory. A UNESCO Scientific & Education Council and former expert with the International Criminal Court, Dr. Anderson examines how female bodies archive collective trauma across generations. Her work interrogates dominant scientific narratives and reclaims somatic knowledge systems rooted in archaeology, gender-based justice, and intercultural interpretation of trauma.