Auteur: yahya
Date: 2001-02-16 23:48:42
AZUL FELLAWEN !
The Berber Project
R. Ben Madison, M.A.
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"The problem in archaeology is when to stop laughing."
--Dr Glyn Daniel, Antiquity, December 1961
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Chapter 1: Afrocentrism, Talossan Style.
"Nos ancêtres, les gaulois...." So began a famous French public school history textbook: "Our ancestors, the Gauls." Needless to say, Black French citizens in the Caribbean were puzzled. "Our" ancestors? They asked. The answer was, oui, if only from a certain point of view. To be French is to share in a culture whose roots were, in whatever nebulous sense, shaped by the ancient merger of Gaulish and Roman peoples--even if one is not "genetically" Gaulish at all. So if the French find some value in dredging up tales of the Gauls in order to make better Frenchmen of themselves and others, we wish them luck.
The ancestral myth of The Kingdom of Talossa involves Berbers. In 1984, I began work on what the History of the Kingdom of Talossa later called a "two-year comic delusion." Inspired in part by an atlas of Jewish history I was reading, I began to wish wistfully that Talossa, like the Jews and like so many European nations, had an "ancient history." Perhaps as a result of my anti-American ravings that year, I had begun to worry that Talossa was "fake" if it was only--like the U.S.--a "nation of immigrants." In May of that year I announced that Talossans were, as a nation, somehow "descended from" ancient Celtic warriors who lived around the French city of Toulouse (get it?). These ancient Celts later migrated across the Atlantic, built Indian mounds in Lake Park, and were somehow the "ancestors" of the Talossan "civilization" which was "restored" in 1979, just like Israel had been restored in 1948.
Serious work on "ancient Talossan history" didn't begin until the spring of 1985, by which time my Celts had transmogrified themselves into North African Berbers. The first (1985) edition of my History of the Kingdom of Talossa spent 45 pages outlining how Berbers had migrated from North Africa to Western Europe, and that they had some hand in building Indian mounds in Milwaukee. The case was, needless to say, pretty weak, but ever since the spring of 1985 one can say with conviction that there has been a "Berber Hypothesis" floating around Talossa. Although it can be stated in different ways--usually the more bombastic the better--the Berber Hypothesis is best left as follows:
The Berber Hypothesis: Ancient North African Berbers contributed to the ancient history of Talossa through their involvement in the prehistory of our European ancestors, and also by creating the ancient Moundbuilder culture on Talossan soil, thereby counting among Talossa's spiritual and physical ancestors.
After 1985 the Berber Hypothesis became Talossa's official "orthodoxy." Its precepts could be found in the official History, and in the pages of Støtanneu and Tú Phäts. Berber words like l'itrì, "star," began infiltrating the Talossan language, and while the skeptical Talossan National Party demanded an official retraction of what it called "24 chapters of rubbish and lies," the Talossan-Berber connexion became a permanent fact of Talossan culture. Mostly in the form of jokes or rolled eyes, Talossans forevermore would talk about Berber origins and Berber ancestry. Only Talossans can say "brrr-brrr!" on a cold day and get the pun. But by 1987, as new immigrants swelled the population of the Kingdom and helped us build a culture involving multiple egos and interpersonal relationships, the Berber Hypothesis began to fade. It was mentioned only in ridicule; the second edition of the History of the Kingdom of Talossa wrote it off as patriotic fiction and actually touted "No Berbers!" as a selling point.
Around 1987 or 1988, during a jaunt with my friends down to the Chocolate Factory at the Prospect Mall, amateur archaeologist Sandee Prachel discovered an old coin on Farwell Avenue about half a block north of North. It was a very old coin: from the Byzantine Empire! Dated to around 498 AD, the coin is now in my personal collection. (Thanks to Sandee, who knows I need money.) This bizarre discovery rekindled my whimsy about an "ancient Talossa." After all, this coin was "proof" that there was some connexion between the ancient Mediterranean and the very soil of Talossa. The jokes and speculation about Berbers and Berberdom escalated, and at last, in November of 1994--with the extreme right and the extreme left voting in opposition--the Cosâ narrowly approved the "You Are What You Talk About, And You Talk About Berbers, Act":
WHEREAS, for the past decade, Talossans have argued about, lampooned, supported, written about, denounced, or backed, various wild theories about our supposed "Berber Ancestry"; and WHEREAS, whether we believe what Dan [Lorentz] called all this "pseudo- racial-lingual horseshit" or not, it has become part of the experience of being Talossan; THEREFORE: The Cosâ hereby resolves and proclaims, that in whatever vague and mysterious way, the Talossan people are inexplicably and inextricably connected somehow to Berbers and that such jokes, debates, and passionate nonsense about Berber heritage have become part of Talossa's folk identity.
In February of 1996--after accumulating a master's degree in history--I set out to examine the historical record for myself, again, and see if a vaguely plausible case could ever be made for the Berber Hypothesis. This book presents the shocking results of those investigations, and attempts to use real sources written by real authors to demonstrate that the Berber Hypothesis is not too wacky to be barely plausible, but still wacky enough to be thoroughly Talossan. Laugh or genuflect; this ridiculous fusion of Talossans and Berbers has become part of our national identity.
In the final analysis, Talossa's Berber history is a form of Afrocentrism, though it happens to deal with White Africans rather than Black Africans. It traces Talossa's mythic heritage "out of Africa," and it is partisan, polemical history with a heavy dose of wit. In a broader perspective, The Berber Project represents a long-established pattern through which dink peoples seek to acquire a glorious past by putting their own slant on history. As a great Talossan once said, "It is highly possible, and therefore true." So whether The Berber Project represents Talossan scholarship or Talossan literature is for you to decide. In either case, I hope The Berber Project is a major contribution to our real or imagined culture.
Chapter 2: Yabba Dabba Doo.
Our ancestors the Berbers are part of the great Afro-Asiatic family of peoples, who are divided among some 240 language groups, spread across the northern third of Africa, from Morocco and Mauritania on the Atlantic seaboard to Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia on the east coast. In addition, languages of the Semitic branch (including Hebrew and Arabic) are spoken in many countries of the Middle East. There are approximately 175 million speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages, and of those, some 12,000,000 speak an estimated two or three hundred Berber dialects, in about a dozen North African countries: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad (Map 1). The Guanches, Berber natives of the Canary Islands, have lost their language and identity after centuries of Spanish oppression.
Human beings first left Africa in a great migration to the Middle East and beyond, some 100,000 years ago (Cavalli-Sforza, 94). In the Fertile Crescent, perhaps some 35,000 to 10,000 years ago, a common "Nostratic" or "Eurasiatic" language began to break up into dialects. While the dialects of the northwest (Anatolia) evolved into the Indo-European languages (of which English is a direct descendant), those of the southwest—in Syria and Israel—developed into the Afro-Asiatic family of languages (Cavalli-Sforza, 222). According to genetic data on the Berbers, who appear to be the "purest" or at least most primitive of these Afro-Asiatic speakers, the separation took place around 15,000 years ago (Cavalli-Sforza, 104). From its Middle-Eastern base, Afro-Asiatic then spread into Africa, across the Mediterranean littoral and up the Nile valley. Although linguistic and racial divisions normally coincide (Ruhlen 1994, ch. 7), the Afro-Asiatic language family contains both White and Black branches, a fact some historians have found "disconcerting" (Ruhlen 1991, 88). It seems most likely that Afro-Asiatic languages were originally spoken by Caucasoids (a fact confirmed by the genetic data) and were later adopted by, or imposed upon, Khoisan or Negroid (Nilo-Saharan?) populations in the upper Nile and East Africa (Cavalli-Sforza, 221).
The Berber peoples themselves have been described as "Irish-looking" (Hart, 45). Oddly for a Mediterranean people, they often exhibit light skin, blue, green, grey or hazel eyes, freckles, and blond hair (Hart, 342f). Genetically they are Caucasoid (Cavalli-Sforza, 165). Gabriel Camps, perhaps the world's leading expert on North African prehistory, states that efforts to claim Black ancestry for the Berbers are "souvent exagérés" (Camps 1974, 158ff). Nevertheless, "proving" that Berbers were Black has for some reason become a major preoccupation of the so-called "Afrocentric" pseudo-historians (Lefkowitz, 30ff), much of whose 'research' borders on functional illiteracy. Example: "The Berbers are a mixed race of Arabs [sic!] who live in North Africa. They originally came from Northern Asia [sic!], India [sic!] and the Caucasus [sic!]..." (Van Sertima, 251). Northern Asia? Maybe they made it to America over the Bering Straits.
Perhaps some of the opposition in Talossa to the Berber Hypothesis stems from the ironic unwillingness to have anything to do with "Africa," but as W.H.C. Frend reminds us, "North Africa may be reckoned as part of the European, Mediterranean world, though an extremely backward part." (Frend, 26).
The Berber language is closely related to Semitic and Ancient Egyptian. Berber and Egyptian were once lumped together as "Hamitic" languages (a term now out of date, but still found occasionally). Many Berber tribes call themselves Imazighen; the language is Tamazight. As I pointed out as early as 1985, the word Tamazight is equivalent, phonetically, to Tolosati, a tribe who inhabited southern France in pre-Roman times and who lent their tribal name to the Roman city called Tolosa (modern French Toulouse). The name Imazighen literally means "free men," and so is equivalent to the European term "Franks."
In temperament, Berbers and modern Talossans have much in common. Both peoples lack a literary genius (witness our newspapers, and perhaps this book) but both are known to be industrious and hard-working (witness the amount of time and effort we spend on Talossa, and this book). In North Africa, it is said, one can easily tell Arabs and Berbers apart by the fact that the Berbers are the ones who work. Talossans and Berbers both nurse the memory of hurts and slights, and Talossan politics so often displays the institution of the vendetta which is dear to both peoples. Berbers and Talossans alike are extremely suspicious, but at the same time they are essentially democratic—so much so that most Talossans, like most Berbers, are fundamentally unfitted by their sense of individualism to sink their differences and to form stable organizations. We both have reputations for argumentation and bickering; in the words of Dan Lorentz, "Long live trivial partisanship—Talossa's life blood!" Even in Roman times, North Africa was considered a paradise for lawyers (D'Ucel, 45ff), while in Talossa, some 10% of the population are judges. "Like the Irish," ethnographer David Hart concludes, the Berbers are "extremely pragmatic, argumentative and quarrelsome" (Hart, 342f).
Millions of Snails
Between 12000 and 10000 BC, Berber-speakers had reached Tunisia where they established the so-called "Dabba Culture" (McBurney, 225). After their arrival from the east, North Africa unquestionably became the domain of the Berbers (Bynon, 506), and it even seems likely that by this time a single "Eurafrican" language was spoken in Iberia, France, North Africa, and parts of Italy (Anderson, 128). While some have attempted to sift between pre- Berber and Berber elements in this language, linguist Johannes Hubschmid warns that it is not possible to do so at this juncture (Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica [hereafter, ELH], 30). This ancient Berber speech deeply affected those non-Berber tribes who settled among Berbers in Western Europe. Many Berber words survive, especially in Spanish and Catalan. Although it is difficult to recover ancient Berber words which have been mangled first in Punic and later in Latin (ELH, 476), one can recognize common words like mata, Spanish for a pile or heap, which is derived from the Berber matta. There are many other examples (ELH, 36ff).
When we speak of ancient "Iberians" from now on, it is understood that we mean Berber settlers in Spain and Portugal. It is generally accepted that the Iberians came to Spain from Africa, and that these same Berber settlers also occupied Sardinia (Elcock, 174). Spanish philologist António Tovar points out that Iberian and "Libyan" (i.e. Berber) burial inscriptions are similar, both often including the word eban ("stone"), or teban in Iberian, with the tell- tale Berber definite article t- (Tovar, 65). Even the words "Iberia" and "Berber" appear to have the same root, the latter being a duplication of the element Ber ("Berber"), and the former consisting of the same element preceded by the Libyan article i- (I-ber) (Diringer, 194f).
The stone-age Dabba Culture began to evolve and by 7350 BC, a clearly-defined "Capsian" culture (named for the town of Gafsa, in southern Tunisia) had begun to replace Dabba in North Africa, where it exercised great influence (Camps 1974, 154). The Capsian culture spread quickly to Spain. McBurney characterizes it as a "most vigorous" culture (226). It was marked by a new kind of silhouette art with very spirited human and animal figures, readily distinguished from the less imaginative Crô-Magnon art. Capsian burials utilized red ochre to decorate the bodies of the dead (Camps 1974, 173ff), a cultural trait which will assume greater importance as this story progresses. There is no doubt the Capsians were Berbers; their skulls are identical to those of modern Berbers (Mokhtar, 424f).
The ancient Capsians settled over immense tracts of land, ranging as far east as Kenya and Tanzania, where the same tool-making, red ochre-using, "Mediterranean Caucasoid types" left traces behind in the so-called "Kenya Capsian" culture (Cole, 257-270). These early Kenyans have been called "Proto-Hamites," but we know little about their ultimate fate. The Tuareg—the southernmost Berber group—are genetically closely related to the Beja, a people living in what is now the Sudan, and from whom they separated some 5,000 years ago (Cavalli-Sforza, 172f). Modern Ethiopians may also be descendants of the "Kenya Capsians"; it is estimated that Ethiopian ancestry is some 60% African and 40% Caucasoid. While the (Caucasoid) Arabian Peninsula is right next door to Ethiopia, Cavalli-Sforza is quick to point out that Berbers are just as likely as Arabs to be the "Caucasoid parents" of the Ethiopian population. Sudan's Nubians are genetically closer to Moroccan Berbers than to any other people (Cavalli-Sforza, 169). African Bantu populations did not reach East Africa until around 200 AD (Phillipson, 228ff), and even to this day town- names bear record of the ancient inhabitants of East Africa. There is a Berber in Sudan, a Berbera in northern Somalia, and even a Berbérati far to the west, in the Central African Republic, reminders perhaps of our ancient Berber ancestors.
The Capsian culture of Africa was famous (or, depending on your palate, infamous) for what Gabriel Camps calls its escargotières—enormous fields of snail shells (Camps 1974, 102ff)! After the Saharan climate began to dry out and the large game died off, the humble snail became the staple diet for the Capsian Berbers, who consumed them by the millions (Trump, 19). Talossans are encouraged to dine on escargots in their honour. Soon the Berbers figured out how to farm—the native Capsians adopted agriculture, rather than a new agricultural folk moving in and taking over; and indeed it may have been the Berbers who taught the Egyptians how to farm (Trump, 55f).
Vikings in Baal-Allah: The Maglemose Berbers of Germany
For one reason or another, Talossans of German descent have been among the most strident critics of any Talossan-Berber connexion. And, obviously, modern Talossans are overwhelmingly of Germanic descent. However, the Germanic peoples did not spring out of the northern European bogs overnight without ancestors of their own. Indeed, to establish a Berber-German link requires no flights of fancy. There is no necessary reason to postulate that since Berbers under Carthaginian rule worshipped Baal, and under Islamic rule they worshipped Allah, that Berbers were responsible for a Viking belief in a heavenly afterlife called Valhalla, or Baal-Allah. Nor is there any reason to insist on a genetic link between Germans and Berbers simply because the Vandals, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Rommel all lusted after territory in North Africa. (Though I admit both hypotheses are delightful...)
The historical, real Berbers were not content to educate the Egyptians or comb the desert wastes of Algeria looking for snails. Whole tribes of Berbers headed north through Spain and into Europe, where they became the ancestors, in part, of the Germanic peoples of that continent. The early Capsian culture first entered into southern and eastern Spain, and probably indicates the first invasion of the Mediterranean race into that country. The later and final phases of the Capsian culture extended northward into France, where its miniature flint implements appear in the Azilian stations of Ariège, and in the Tardenoisian fishing flints of France, Belgium, and the British Isles. These Western European cultures were almost certainly developed in Africa and brought from there (Obermaier, x-xi). Dr. Francis Owen confirms that during the Mesolithic Age, "there was a new invasion of Europe by people from the Southern Mediterranean. These were the bearers of the microlithic culture, a late development of the Capsian" (Owen, 18). These people, known as the "Tardenoisians," used distinctive arrowheads, fish-hooks, and other tools, and spread their culture throughout Germany as far as Poland. In the words of J.G.D. Clark, the advent of the Tardenoisian culture in Northern Europe was "almost certainly" the result of "movements of people from North Africa" (Clark 1970b, 214f).
Between 6800 and 5000 BC, the Tardenoisian culture reached its fullest flowering in Northern Europe, where it is known as the "Maglemose Culture," after a site in Denmark. The Maglemose folk had a rich culture adapted to life in the northern forests and plains, and spread across Denmark, southern Sweden, the Low Countries, England, Ireland, northeast France, northern Germany, Poland, Estonia and Finland. Their definite "heartland" was in northern Germany and Denmark (Clark 1970b, 86ff). After a detailed weighing of all the evidence, Clark pronounces the source of the Maglemose culture to be, at least in part, "probably in North Africa" (Clark 1970b, 132).
Maglemose art utilized the same geometric patterns--especially triangles and chevrons—which characterize North African Berber art. The realistic depictions of animals in Maglemose art are virtually identical with contemporary Iberian art, and derive "probably ultimately from North Africa" (Clark 1970b, 167-180). This astonishing homogeneity of culture spreading from North Africa to Finland "can only be explained on an ethnic basis" (Clark 1970b, 214f). Similarities between Berber and Germanic art and culture have forced some archaeologists into wild hypotheses about German migrations to North Africa (Sergi, 71ff), but it is now clear that the influence was in the other direction. Professor Igor Diakonoff concludes that the mesolithic "Atlanto-Baltic white race" spoke Berber (Markey and Greppin, 61). Sergi proclaims that the pre-Indo-European natives of northern Europe were definitely Berbers, and that their influence lingers in the Germanic peoples. In Norway and Sweden, "the remains of the ancient stock of African origin are very numerous, even more than in northern Germany" (Sergi, 243f).
Through this line, most modern Talossans can trace their ancestry directly to Berbers. The Indo-Europeans who later occupied Scandinavia and Germany did not exterminate the earlier, Berber-speaking inhabitants; they absorbed them. Forde-Johnston notes that Scandinavian Nordics are so similar to the African Berber Nordics, that "the two must share a common origin" (Forde-Johnston, 101). Owen also links Berbers and Germans directly when he states that the pre-Indo-European natives of north Europe, who had their "origin in the Southern Mediterranean area," were "in part the ancestors of the Germanic people" (Owen, 23). Berbers are among our ancestors!
More research is necessary to show exactly how far-ranging our Berber ancestors were. The Pelasgians, who inhabited Greece before the arrival of the Greeks, were possibly Berbers. When Sergi proposed this in 1901, he was ridiculed. Yet the explanatory power of his hypothesis would not go away, and recently linguist Eric Hamp has produced more evidence in its favour. He says the Pelasgian language belongs in the same "aggregate" as that of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Northern Europe (Markey and Greppin, 294). The ancient Greek historian Herodotus referred to the Pelasgians as BARBAROI, which can either mean "Barbarians" or "Berbers" (the word is ambiguous; Sergi, 167). There is evidence that the Etruscans were Berbers too (Sergi, 162ff). But for our purposes, we shall concentrate on the Berbers of Western Europe and their outposts in the Atlantic... and in Talossa.
Big Rocks: The Megalith Bewegung
By about 5000 BC, North Africa and Western Europe shared a single culture and language, which was doubtlessly Berber. At this point the focus of our story shifts to the Iberian peninsula. Agriculture reached Iberia at about that time (MacKie, 39), and the peninsula became the focus of two great social movements which affected all of prehistoric Western Europe. The first was the "Megalithic" culture responsible for the great "Megaliths" (i.e. "Big Rocks") at Stonehenge and elsewhere; the second was the "Beaker Groups" who left archaeological traces of themselves all over the region.
The so-called "Megalithic" culture began to develop among the Iberians in what is now Portugal, sometime around 4500 (MacKie, 38). Though there was undoubtedly a North African component to the culture (MacKie, 162), it was an indigenous development, not inspired by the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean (Trump, 102). It spread rapidly by sea, up and down the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, as a glance at Map 2 will easily demonstrate (MacKie, 187ff); Megalithic "seafarers" carried their culture up and down the Atlantic coast from the Canary Islands in the south to Ireland in the north (Willcox, 48). The Greek philosopher Plato's account of "Atlantis" may in fact be a distorted memory of Megalithism; Plato remembered "Atlantis" as ruling over Europe west of Tuscany, and North Africa west of Egypt, a remarkably accurate appraisal of the greatest extent of Megalith culture (Gordon, 43).
Megalithism spread alongside agriculture. Neolithic farmers reached the British Isles at the same time as Megaliths began to be constructed in that region (MacKie, 168ff). Ethnically speaking, who where these Megalith builders? Evidently they were Iberian Berbers (MacKie, 168). G.B. Adams identifies them as "Hamitic" (Adams 1975, 235), i.e. Berber, and the world-renowned prehistorian Dr. Glyn Daniel concludes that "It seems certain that the megalith builders did not speak an Indo-European language. We should expect them to speak a Mediterranean language, some pre-Indoeuropean language which may have survived to the present day as Berber or as Basque" (Daniel, 131). Even skeptics consider the idea of Berber Megalith-builders "a not unreasonable working hypothesis" (Adams 1975, 247).
Megalithism was almost certainly an "evangelical" religious movement, dominated by a stable caste of professional priests and wise men who settled among, and over, the neolithic peasant populations of Atlantic Europe (MacKie, 162f). This priesthood lived in "monasteries," supported by tithing from the farmers (MacKie, Ch. 11).
The geographic extent of Megalithic Berber culture is sobering (Map 2). "Megalithism" spread across North Africa and the whole of Western Europe, from Iberia to France, the Italian Alps, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, lower Scandinavia, and the British Isles. Virtually every person who has ever become a citizen of Talossa can trace his or her ancestry back to one or more of these regions. In a very real sense, we may all be physically, genetically descended from the Mediterranean and Atlantic Berbers who added their genes to the pool wherever they went. Perhaps Talossa today is a kind of long-dormant Berber racial memory crying out for reunification?
At some point between 4000 and 2600, the Spanish Capsian culture--the less-developed Berber neolithic culture of eastern Spain who had been left behind by the dramatic expansion of their western Megalithic cousins—began to evolve into a new force, called the Almerían (Trump, 99; Childe, 267ff; Castro, 12). This was a "chalcolithic" culture, meaning that it used copper in addition to stone for making tools (Trump, 99). The Megalith culture had resisted the use of copper, and remained mired in its primitive, stone-age ways. Around 2600, the Megalithic social network collapsed and its heartland, southern Portugal, adopted the chalcolithic lifestyle (Castro, 35; MacKie, 170f). Megalithic culture survived longest in the British Isles, where it finally went extinct around 2000 BC—at about which time it left its most magnificent monument, Stonehenge (MacKie, 171).
Chapter 3: Funnel-Necked Beaker People.
According to V. Gordon Childe, the Almerían culture of Spain was the direct source for the social movement we call the "Beaker Groups" (Childe, 267ff). Trump, however, suggests that the Beaker Groups originated in Portugal, and attacked the Almerían cities (Trump, 152). Cunliffe suggests a harmony of the two theories, wherein the Beaker Groups originated in Portugal spreading quickly back to North Africa and then moved east to encounter the already complex chalcolithic cultures of the Almeríans, in their elaborate fortified centres; the two cultures then peacefully merged (Cunliffe, 256). Whatever the case, early Beaker culture artifacts are found in Tunisia, and the ethnic and cultural roots of the Beaker Groups were self-evidently Berber. Many cultural traits, such as the design of their arrowheads, link North Africa's Berbers to the Beaker Groups (Childe, 280). G.B. Adams refers to them as "Libyco-Berber" (Adams 1975, 236). Forde-Johnston concludes that the "most reasonable" explanation for the Beaker culture is that it is of "mixed Spanish and African ancestry" (Forde-Johnston, 101).
The new wave of Berbers expanded rapidly; around 3000 they had already invaded southern France with their "tastefully decorated" pottery, settling thickly in the Aude, Hérault, and lower Rhône (Trump, 148f). Here their tribes survived into Roman times, especially the Tolosati, who lent their name to the city of Tolosa (French: Toulouse); and the Tolossæ, who lived in what is now Provence. That the tribes of this region were not Celtic (as is often supposed) is revealed by the fact that the Celtic Gauls who always called themselves the Com-broges, or "fellow-countrymen" (whence Cymru, "Welsh") referred to one of the local tribes as Allo-broges, or "other-countrymen," i.e. "non- Celts." Other tribal names show similarities as well; in Roman times there was a Salassii (i.e. "Talassii"?) tribe of Berbers in North Africa, and also a Salassi ("Talassi"?) tribe of unknown origin living in what is now the Val d'Aosta, in the Occitan-speaking French/Italian border region (Gsell 1:325).
In the Iberian Peninsula itself, Beaker Groups became famous for their construction of motillas, which were a kind of fortified burial mound (Castro, 106f). The building of mounds was a hallmark of Berber and Berber-inspired cultures around the globe. Known today among African Berbers as djidar (Ucel, 67f; this appears to be an Arabic word), these mounds were built not only in Africa but throughout the first Berber expansion known as Megalithism. While the ancient cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean buried their noble dead in rock-hewn tombs, the Megalith-builders built rock tombs but sealed them inside large earthen mounds (MacKie, 146).
The Beaker Folk's beakers, of course, were more famous than their mounds. The beakers were drinking vessels, pottery versions of what had long been woven in North Africa out of esparto grass (Trump, 155). They were used for "something like mead, flavoured with herbs such as meadowsweet or wild fruits" (Cunliffe, 253). Alcoholic drinks were clearly a factor in the Beaker Groups' expansion and social acceptance. In North Africa, Berbers produced beakers in exactly the same style and fashion as their European contemporaries (McBurney, 249ff). They decorated them with distinctive "hatched triangles" and other designs (Kennedy 1971, 268). The classic Beaker design was rather bell-shaped, so most Beaker People are referred to as "Bell-Beaker People." This is in distinction to the "Funnel-Necked Beaker People," who arose in Germany and Denmark as a fusion between Berbers and immigrant Indo-Europeans. (It was their beakers, rather than the people themselves, who were funnel-necked.)
The Beaker Folk were fundamentally traders, and wherever they went, they were welcomed not as hated conquerers but as friends. They formed stable outposts, and their tombs contain multiple generations of family members (Trump, 151). Beaker people tended not to settle in large numbers, except in certain places such as the Rhône valley and the Gulf of Lyon region, i.e. Toulouse (Trump, 153). But what they lacked in population density they made up for in geographic reach (Map 2). The Berber Beaker People established complex trading networks, and the diverse regions of Western Europe and North Africa were united as never before (Cunliffe, 256). Ivory and ostrich egg shells were highly prized luxuries, and the only source was North Africa, where eager Beaker traders did a booming business (Markotic, 91ff). Indeed, the trade between Africa and Spain even pre-dated the Beaker period (Harrison, 157). Of more importance to our story was their lucrative copper trade: they brought chalcolithic culture to Western Europe (Trump, 148f) and to do so, imported vast amounts of copper. Where did this copper come from? We shall all see!
Around 2000 BC, the Berbers of North Africa became preoccupied with local affairs and grew in a different direction from their European relations. To the south, a thriving Black civilization, based in the Tassili mountains of southern Algeria, represented the northward expansion of Africans toward the Mediterranean. But by 1500 BC, the Berbers had domesticated the horse, and used it to pull light war chariots. Wearing kilts and armed with spears, the Berbers checked this northward expansion and took control of the arid Saharan steppes, exploiting it for nomadic pastoralism. Their new technology and stratified society "enabled them to subjugate the existing black population.... [W]e are dealing here with a warrior aristocracy which had gained ascendancy over the black groups of the Sahara: this is the first instance of a pattern which has been repeated to the present day" (Brett and Fentress, 17ff).
By contrast the Beaker Berbers of Spain had begun to decline (Trump, 223), though related groups remained active. In the Balearic Islands, for example, the local inhabitants were building fortified towers, known as talayots (Trump, 225ff); these so-called "Talaiotic" people survived well into the Christian era (Anderson, 131). A similar culture flourished in next-door Sardinia (Trump, 217). It is important to remember that the native, pre-Roman inhabitants of Sardinia were in all likelihood Berbers (Harris and Vincent, 345; Tagliavini, 124). If the ancient Balearans were also Berbers, which seems likely, then the name of their towers--talayots--may preserve a reminder of what these ancients called themselves.
Talo, Tolo, Tuul, Tell, Tala, Tle, Atla, etc.
In 1979, I derived the name "Talossa" from the Finnish talo, or "house." At first it seemed only a fortuitous coincidence that the word Talossa bore a superficial resemblance to Tolosa or Tamazight. The truth is, it now seems likely that the root talo was used by our Berber ancestors both to describe the structures (talayots) they built, and also to describe themselves the people who built those structures. The Afro-Asiatic root word tûul- means "to rise; to form a heap, mound." From this root come both the Arabic tell (man-made mound, artificial hill) and the related word tuul (hill, heap) in the Cushitic languages of East Africa. In Berber Africa, "Tell denotes the mountainous but fertile region of Algeria and Morocco between the Atlas [Mountains] and the Mediterranean" (Fage & Oliver, 548). In Ireland, the native word tulach ("small hill") is also cognate with the Arabic tell (Adams 1975, 240), while in Iberia the meaning shifted to "tower" (talayot). In Karok, a language of North America which may be related to Berber, the form is tuy (mound). The same root apparently entered Finnish, where its meaning ("to raise up") shifted to house (i.e. what one raises up). Perhaps talo originally meant any artificial mound or structure built by man. The ancient Talossans, therefore, would be "The Builders," who could look down, literally, on their primitive neighbours, the ones who did not build.
Dotting the landscape of North Africa and Western Europe are hundreds of sites bearing the "Talossan" name, especially in the Megalith-Berber heartland of the Iberian Peninsula. A few of the talo, tala, or talu place names might come from a related root in Arabic, but the Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica is careful to say that not all of them do; indeed, many of these sites are outside those areas dominated by the Arabs during the Middle Ages, but correspond quite nicely to the Talossan Megalith/Beaker distribution of our ancestors (ELH, 619ff). It will not surprise us to find major Beaker Culture sites at Atalayuela, Spain, and Atalaia, Portugal (Castro, 64 and 89).
The same root tal- or talos- is found everywhere from TLemcen, near the ATLaS Mountains, to the ATLantic Ocean. A sub-tribe of the leading Berber tribe in Morocco is called the TALESINNT (Abdel-Massih, xiii). The name occurs among the Gaulish tribes called the TOLOSati and TOLOSSæ, and of course in the city they founded, TOLOSa (Toulouse). There is also a TOLOSa in Spain. Perhaps when Plato called the Berber Megalith culture "ATLantis," he remembered their actual name? Other forms include the countries of CaTALOnia and CasTELLa (Castile), and even the CaTALaunian Fields where the Hun invasion of Europe was stopped. The prefix cas- or ca- comes from Latin "casa," house or domain. To this day, villages such as Ca N'Eures, Ca l'Estrada, etc., dot the Catalonian landscape, where "ca" is prefixed to the name of a family or tribe; "Catalonia" is simply therefore Ca Talunya, Domain of the Talossans. The Spanish were always very good about naming ethnic enclaves in their country witness Andalusía (originally, "land of the Vandals"), and the dozens of names like Villagodos ("Gothtown") and Sueca ("Swabian town") that dot the Spanish landscape. No doubt Atalaia and Atayaluela and there are many others commemorate the pre-Roman Berber inhabitants of Spain, the talayot builders, the Talossans.
Amalgamation, Mixing, and Intermingling
Indo-Europeans invaded Germany from the southeast around 3000 BC, and here they intermingled with the local Berbers, "producing a number of mixed cultures in the process," as far south as Switzerland (Owen, 31). Owen refers to this as an "amalgamation" of the Berber and Indo-European peoples (Owen, 45). By 1700 BC, a new culture had appeared in Denmark, southern Sweden, and northern Germany, known as the "Northern Bronze Age." German archaeologist Herbert Schutz notes that this Bronze Age culture arose from the "intermingling of groups of people," including the Indo-European migrants from the east, and the "megalith-builders," whose Berber background is well- established (Schutz, 155). Beyond a doubt the Northern Bronze Age was "the ancestral civilization of the Germanic peoples" (Skomal, 218f), so the link between Berbers and Germans has been proven. Or, at the very least, it has been established as a reasonable working hypothesis. It is not some bizarre tangent or Erich von Dänikenesque lunacy. It is a scientific theory with professional support.
Germanic peoples speak Germanic languages, and it has long been recognized that a substantial pre-Indo- European component exists in those languages. Piergiuseppe Scardigli estimates that a full 40% of the basic ancient Germanic vocabulary is not Indo-European, but rather comes from some other source. This includes such basic words as land, rain, path, silver, and word (Scardigli, 103f). Edgar Polomé finds it "obvious" that Germanic retains traces of the language spoken by the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Denmark and northern Germany (Polomé 1986, 661).
Are there any linguistic links between Berber and German? Berber, like the related Semitic languages, uses vowel mutation to express a change of meaning. Thus amagur (camel) becomes imugar (camels). This same feature is characteristic of Germanic languages as well; thus English man/men, foot/feet, write/wrote, etc. In The Loom of Language, Bodmer observes that Germanic and Semitic share this distinctive feature (Bodmer, 429) which is, needless to say, uncommon in other Indo-European languages. Based on its traces in Germanic, Eric Hamp reconstructs the pre-Indo-European language of northern Europe as one in which there was a four-vowel system with no distinct "o," and which used the same words for deictic and relative pronouns (Markey and Greppin, 296ff). Guess what? Berber has a four-vowel system with no "o" and uses the same words for deictic and relative pronouns.
Many pre-Indo-European root words surviving in Germanic can be traced back to an Afro-Asiatic source (the parent language family of Berber). An excellent example is the word silver, which comes from Berber azerfa. This term was apparently spread throughout Western Europe by the Beaker Folk, who traded in silver (Cardona, 293). Berber words in Germanic include:
EARLY GERMANIC ~ AFRO-ASIATIC (Proto-Berber)
baus (bad, evil, useless; German böse) ~ ba's (calamity, misfortune)
ela (eel) ~ 'il (snake)
gawi (district; German Gau) ~ gawad (land, with epenthesis)
kelikn (loft, upper story) ~ qal'a (fortress, hill, citadel [Skomal, 223ff])
land (land, country) ~ lha'nt (grassland, with collective suffix)
paþa (path) ~ put (to step along)
preu (awl, piercing tool) ~ par (to separate, cut apart, make an opening)
regen (rain; German Regen) ~ rayyn (well-watered, with noun suffix)
sek (to cut, mow; English sickle) ~ tsîk (to pluck up)
silver (silver) ~ azerfa (silver)
summer (summer) ~ asammar (hot weather)
werð (word) ~ werd (to call out)
Germans are not the only West European nation deeply influenced by Berber culture. Celtic is especially rich in Berberisms. Even a common Irish word like aue, "grandson," comes from the Berber aouwi, "son." This is, by the way, the root of the Irish prefix Ó, still found in Irish names like O'Reilly this most common "Irish" word is actually Berber! Irish tribal names like Uí Máine, Uí Faoláin, and Uí Néill, seem to have been patterned after the Berber collective prefix found in Ait Frah, Ait Ouriaghel, and Aït Ndhir (Adams 1975, 240ff). According to world-renowned scholar Julius Pokorny, it is "from every point of view impossible" that the Celts were the earliest inhabitants of Ireland; the Berbers came first (Pokorny, 229). He reminds us that the Megalithic inhabitants of Éire were long- headed Mediterraneans, who "still form the principal element in the population of North Africa." There are many customs in common between Celts and Berbers, Pokorny assures us, including "queer sexual morals" (Pokorny 232f). Welsh scholars have also affirmed "the kinship of the early inhabitants of Britain to the North African white race" (Sergi, 246), while the linguistic evidence of nouns, verbs, infixed pronouns, pre-verbs, consonant quality, and lenition of consonants all proves "close relations between Berber and Insular Celtic" (Pokorny, 236ff). Talossans of Celtic descent can rejoice in their Berber ancestry too.
Especially in their syntax, Celtic, Spanish, Basque, Portuguese, French and English have all been deeply affected by this same "Atlantic" substratum, which Gessman calls "almost certainly Hamitic" (Gessman, 7). And so, although modern Talossans might not knowingly speak a word of Berber (or Talossan), every time we open our mouths to speak, we confess our ancient Berber heritage!
Stagnant and Backward
Alas, the Berbers of Iberia and Western Europe were eventually reduced to little more than a collection of place-names, after the massive invasion of Indo-Europeans that came from the east. A culture known to archaeologists as the "Únêtice-Tumulus-Urnfield Culture" (Urnfielders, for short) emerged in central Europe and was "marked by expansion"; by 1600 BC there was "extensive unrest" in the region and within fifty years the Urnfielders exploded to the west. In the face of the Urnfielders--marauding head-hunters from the East (Castro, 123)--the Berbers disappeared like the American Indian (Schutz, 133ff). The Urnfielders who settled in the upper Rhine, Gaul, and (eventually) Iberia were Celts (Gimbutas, 339f). As we shall see in the next chapter, these invasions generated a huge wave of refugees who fled to a place which is near and dear to our modern Talossan hearts.
In central Spain, after the decline of the Beaker culture, many of its traits were preserved by groups whom the archaeologists call the Las Cogotes culture (Castro, 132-138). It will not surprise us to learn that one of their most important sites is called Berbeia (Castro, 132f). This last outpost of Berber Beakerdom began declining after 1100 BC, when it was invaded by the head-hunting Urnfielders (Castro, 123). By 700 BC, the Las Cogotes Beaker Groups had been destroyed (Castro, 131-137). At about the same time, Celts overran the rest of Gaul, where the local Berber culture had become "stagnant and backward" (Trump, 220).
The Indo-European invaders absorbed the Berbers wherever they went. Only the hardy mountaineering Basques (who aren't Berbers) could withstand the Indo-European onslaught. The Picts, who preserved their non-Indo-European language in Scotland till the Middle Ages, may have been Berber in origin. The Berbers of Spain regrouped and even flourished; the Bible speaks of the trading fleets of Tarshish, an Iberian port on the Atlantic Ocean that was constructed as early as 1100 BC (Castro, 179). The native name for Tarshish was Tarseia (Warmington, 24), and as "r" and "l" were interchangeable in Iberian (Anderson, 122), the name was actually Talseia, i.e., "Talossa." The Talseian written language was clearly derived from Berber (Jensen, 158f). But the Talseians were conquered by the Punic-speaking Carthaginians, and later by the Romans; their Berber speech died out during the reign of Augustus Caesar, who died in 14 AD (Anderson, 131).
In Africa the Berbers are still around, of course, and they have made great contributions to world history. St. Augustine was a Berber, as was his rival Donatus of Casæ Nigræ, founder of the "Donatist" Christian Church. In the seventh century the Arabs invaded; the Berbers embraced Islam and thereby seceded permanently from Western civilization, but established successful Islamic empires like the Almohads and Almoravids. Ironically the Spanish victory which sealed the doom of the Moors (most of whom were actually Berber) in Spain, in the year 1212, took place at Los Navos de Tolosa! Later on the Hilali Arabs invaded and ravaged North Africa, reducing it to the simplest sort of goat herding. Today Berbers are manning the front lines against Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria.
Chapter 4: Berbers Sailed the Ocean Blue.
As impressive as the Berber contribution to Western European history may be, it seems irrelevant to the main point at hand, which is, what (the hell) do Berbers have to do with Talossa? Talossa is, after all as much as I might pretend otherwise smack-dab in the middle of the North American continent.
Even an Amphibious Jeep
As noted above, Megalithic Berber culture spread itself across the western seaboard of Europe by sea. While North American Indians lacked seaworthy craft, ocean-going boats were available to the Megalith Berbers. Boats made of wood and skins were used in the British Isles even before the Megalith Berbers arrived there; these boats are equivalent to the modern Irish curragh, which despite its small size is an excellent craft for the Atlantic (Kehoe, 276ff).
Despite the dread Europeans felt about sailing the Atlantic in the days of Christopher Columbus, the Atlantic is in fact quite easy to sail. Since 1492, there have been hundreds of authenticated "amateur" crossings in vessels of every imaginable description including dugout canoes, rafts, six-foot sailboats, kayaks, rubber life rafts, and even an amphibious jeep (Kehoe, 275f). It was no harder to cross the Atlantic in 4500 BC than it is today. Indeed, it would have been considerably easier for neolithic Berbers to reach America than for the equally primitive Polynesians to reach the many tiny isles of the Pacific; after all, the target was simply too big to miss (Riley, 299).
Shortly before Talossan Megaliths began springing up all over Atlantic Europe, Scandinavian cod fishermen seem to have opened the New World to European influence and vice versa. According to historian Alice Kehoe of Marquette University, travellers using the Irminger Current past Iceland and Greenland helped carry trade and cultures both ways across the North Atlantic (Kehoe, 285ff). The impact from this trade was quickly felt all over the St. Lawrence River valley and down the American East Coast (Map 3): around 4500 BC a new culture known as the "Late Archaic" emerged "suddenly," with no discernable predecessor. All its traits, including gorges, adzes, plummets, ground slate points and knives, barbed bone harpoons and peculiar chipped stone projectile points, occur in northwestern Europe at an earlier date (Kehoe, 286).
The Megalithic Berbers touched off this transatlantic trade. They brought agriculture to Western Europe and sold grain to the fishermen who provided the Berbers with fish. Increased demand for fish drove the Scandinavians further and further out to sea in this case, all the way to America (Kehoe, 286f). Since the Megalithic Berbers were evangelical religious zealots, they began to accompany these Scandinavian pioneers on the northern route to America. Huge stone megaliths, identical to those being built in Europe, suddenly popped up in New England. Distinctive "dolmens" (multi-ton boulders balanced precisely on three smaller stones) were constructed on both sides of the Atlantic. Received opinion holds this to be pure coincidence, but it is hardly plausible that these enormous and distinctive structures should "just happen" to be invented on two different continents at exactly the same time, especially in the one part of America most accessible to the Megalith builders of Europe (Trento, ch. 2). After 3500 BC, at the height of Megalithic influence from Europe, the first small burial mounds begin to appear on the American East Coast in imitation of the Berber practice (Fagan, 361).
The impact of the Megalith Berbers on North America is not all that clear; those interested in the Megalithic aspect of American prehistory should consult Trento in the bibliography. While Megalithic influence may have been important, there do not appear to have been substantial numbers of Megalithic settlers. And no Megalithic sites have been uncovered near Talossa. However, when Megalithism waned in Europe and the Beaker Groups began their expansion, they set into motion a chain of events which would transform the New World and give the Kingdom of Talossa a genuine, Berbercentric prehistory.
The Milwaukee Beakers: The "Old Copper Culture"
Ca. 3000 BC, the Berber-speaking Beaker Groups rolled across Western Europe and knit that region together by a network of trading posts. Ideas were traded just as easily as goods, and through their Megalithic contacts, these Berbers undoubtedly became aware of the presence of suppliers or customers across the Atlantic. And the crucial trade item was copper. Beaker Groups, keen to exploit copper deposits wherever they could be found, began to navigate to the New World. They possessed a geographic advantage the Scandinavian cod fishermen lacked the easiest route to North America was the Atlantic Current from Iberia or North Africa to the Caribbean (Kehoe, 280). I submit that around 3000 BC, North America was indeed treated to a large and substantial wave of Berber immigrants who brought their culture with them when they settled around the copper mines of Lake Superior and northern Wisconsin.
Would Native Americans have welcomed this wave of new settlers from Europe? There is no reason why not; Native Americans have a reputation for hospitality (witness Moctezuma's ill-fated reception of Cortéz). Outsiders were frequently "adopted" into posts of authority in native social systems; a boatload of sixteen shipwrecked Africans managed in short order to take control of an entire province in Ecuador in the 16th century (Riley, 16). But what about disease? If "European diseases" (mostly smallpox) were responsible for the horrific deaths of millions of Native Americans following Columbus' "discovery" of America in 1492, then why wouldn't a wave of Berber immigrants in 3000 BC bring with them the same diseases and have the same devastating effect? The answer is surprisingly simple: Because these "European diseases" hadn't reached Europe yet, the Berbers couldn't pass them on to America. Smallpox, the main culprit in the post-1492 American demographic collapse, was totally unknown in the Western Mediterranean before 395 BC, and was not endemic in Western Europe until the time of Christ (Hopkins, 19ff).
The Berber Beaker colonists were initially traders, and came in search of wealth. They found it in copper, huge amounts of it, around Lake Superior, and especially on Ile Royale, which is reputedly the best source of pure copper on the entire planet (WA 67:220). To mine, process, and transport this copper, large numbers of Berber men (and not many women, as will be explained later) descended on the American Midwest and the St. Lawrence River valley. Not long after 3000, their culture appears suddenly around Lake Superior. Archaeologists have called it the "Old Copper Culture" (Mason, 194; Map 3).
The chief artifact of the Old Copper Culture is, of course, copper; a vast range of copper tools appears suddenly in the archaeological record with no antecedent. Mason remarks: "Incredible numbers of copper artifacts tens of thousands in eastern Wisconsin alone attest to a use of the metal that is at variance with historical and ethnographic descriptions of Indian life" (Mason, 185). The mines these Berbers established yielded mind-boggling amounts of copper an estimated 500,000 tons! Only a tiny fraction of this can be accounted for in New World archaeological sites, so where did the rest of it all go? The best explanation is that it went to the growing civilizations of the Mediterranean, to fuel the growing "chalcolithic" economies of the Old World (Bailey, 29f; Fingerhut, 49). The Berbers who settled the New World have left records of their first appearance; sculptured stones north of Lake Superior closely resemble those found in the Berber-speaking Canary Islands (Bailey, 101). Indeed the resemblance is so obvious that some scholars once suggested that the Canary Islanders originated in America (Sergi, 129).
When it comes to Old Copper Culture artifacts, the Kingdom of Talossa and the immediately surrounding area is a gold-mine (well, O.K., a copper mine). The Kingdom is full of Old Copper sites; Talossa is the very hub of their culture (WA 67:223). And one can only guess at how much additional evidence of Berber settlement in Talossa was destroyed when Lake Michigan heaved over its bounds and submerged the entire Kingdom around 2300 BC (WA 67:216f, 225) during one of the glacial periods.
Nevertheless, the Old Copper Culture people were "our ancient Berber ancestors" par excellence. They were the earliest Berber inhabitants of Talossan soil, and they set off a whole chain of dramatic events which would transform the Western Hemisphere and give us Talossans, five thousand years later, a whole lot to argue about. Beaker Culture and Old Copper Culture can be directly compared. There are of course differences, but this proves nothing; the absence of evidence is not evidence. Any group of intelligent people can totally change their culture at the drop of a hat. It is only the cultural similarities which are important:
Old Copper Culture
(including "Red Ochre" phase)
Arose ca. 3000 BC (WA 67:217)
Flexed burials (WA 67:225)
Burial in mounds (WA 67:229)
Cremation (WA 67:225)
Burial with stone arrowheads (WA 67:221)
Burial with copper daggers (WA 67:220)
Burial without pottery (WA 67:234)
Bow-shaped pendants (WA 67:219f)
Hunter-gatherers (WA 67:227)
Red ochre in burial (WA 67:229)
Wrist-guards (WA 67:222)
Copper mining using fire and water (WA 67:220)
"Annealed" (tempered) copper (WA 67:220)
Beaker Group Culture
(especially in North Africa)
Arose ca. 3000 BC (Trump, 148f)
Flexed burials (Schutz, 120f)
Burial in mounds (Cunliffe, 251ff)
Cremation (Schutz, 120f)
Burial with stone arrowheads (Harrison, 92ff)
Burial with copper daggers (Harrison, 111)
Burial without pottery (Mokhtar, 435)
Bow-shaped pendants (Harrison, 51f)
Hunter-gatherers (Harrison, 23 and 100)
Red ochre in burial (Camps 1961, 521ff)
Wrist-guards (Harrison, 9)
Copper mining using fire and water (Schutz, 127f)
"Annealed" (tempered) copper (Schutz, 127f)
The Couscous Western
The Old Copper Berbers mined copper and were fruitful and multiplied for 1500 years before a major revolution took place. As we saw above, around 1500 BC the Berber cultures of Western Europe were savagely disrupted by the invasion of Celtic headhunters. Refugees--first a trickle, then a flood--began to flee from the ceaseless predations of these red-haired invaders from the East. Thousands boarded their curraghs and set sail for America: tired, tempest-tossed, huddled masses of Berbers yearning to breathe free. A massive surge of Berber immigration to North America from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula was underway, as proven by a whole host of cultural innovations from the Beaker Group culture which burst upon the North American scene. Harvard Professor Barry Fell dates a major wave of "Iberian" (i.e. Berber) colonists to the New World to this period (Fell 1976, frontispiece).
At this point in the archaeological record, Berber cultural traits appear suddenly and mysteriously all across the eastern United States and in the Caribbean. North African bent-stick and split-stick hafting techniques for grooved stone axes, for example, spread throughout the region. Agriculture, pottery, earthen mounds, and "new artifacts" arrived suddenly (Mason, 202). In Central America, pottery dating from this period is virtually identical to that being produced by North African Berbers (Kennedy 1971, 270f). All over the northeastern part of North America, the dominant "Vinette 2" style of pottery shows clear Iberian Beaker influence (Kehoe, 290f). At the same time, The Old Copper Berbers in southeastern Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana begin to employ the use of red ochre in their burial rites in large quantities. Archaeologists often refer to this stage of Berber development as a "Red Ochre Culture" (Mason 224). But it is important to note that the Old Copper and Red Ochre "cultures" were in truth a single entity (WA 67:229; Griffin, 239; Map 3). This use of red ochre in burial rites is, needless to say, a well-known feature of Berber culture (Camps 1974, 173ff).
It is equally possible that Berbers in the New World adopted "native" American Indian cultural traits and brought them back to Africa. Both sides of the ocean were forging a "Pan-Atlantic culture." North African Berbers had buffalo and raised them (Heeren, 1:221f; McBurney, 82). Irish mythological figures such as Cú Chulainn, which prove close ties between Celts and Berbers, have exact parallels among American Indians too (Pokorny, 236). According to Herodotus, Berbers wore what we call "Mohawk" haircuts like some Indian tribes. Berbers also engaged in the same kind of "vision quest" commonly found in Native American cultures (Herodotus, 4:172ff). To this day, Berbers have the same kind of animal legends as North American Indian mythology (Hart, 164f). Berbers had arrowheads, atlatls (spear-throwing devices), wore feathers in their hair, and wore fringed leather clothing, exactly like the Native American peoples of North America (Kennedy 1971, 272f). It seems that long before the "Spaghetti Western," there was the Couscous Western!
It seems the only reasonable explanation for this sudden, massive infusion of Berber cultural traits is a sudden, massive infusion of Berbers. At the very same time--1500 BC--we find the construction of the first real "city" on the North American continent, at a site archaeologists call "Poverty Point," along the Mississippi River in Louisiana (Map 4). Here, Berber-style mound-building in the New World appears out of nowhere (Shaffer, 6). Poverty Point was a trading city--a chalcolithic Berber Singapore--through which the copper wealth of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes was funnelled. Much Lake Superior copper made it all the way to the Gulf Coast (Mason, 188), and north-south trade with the 'Red Ochre Culture' is abundantly proven (WA 67:230). Utilizing Megalithic ideas, Poverty Point's mounds were aligned so as to predict the vernal and autumnal equinoxes (Fagan, 352). At its peak, between 1000 and 700, Poverty Point had a population of over 5,000 people. Its direct territorial control took in the Mississippi Valley in Missisippi, Louisiana, and southern Arkansas (Shaffer, 6). The modern name, "Poverty Point," is most unfortunate; it was an enormous and thriving city perhaps "Prosperity Point" would be more appropriate. Interestingly, the city was divided into two districts, indicating some kind of social distinction (Fagan, 352). Possibly one part was the "Indian Quarter" and the other, the "Berber Quarter."
Some trade may have been conducted via the St. Lawrence River as well, as implied by the presence of Old Copper Culture artifacts in sites along the Ottawa valley between Ontario and Québec (Mason, 188; WA 67:225). At one of these copper sites in Ontario, petroglyphs were found showing pictures of sea-going vessels, with captions written in tifinagh, the ancient but clumsy alphabet the Berbers often employed (McGlone, Chapter 14).
Down at Poverty Point, we find firm evidence of beakers (Shaffer, 34). The Beaker Folk were noted for their manufacture of alcoholic beverages--that's what the beakers were for--and in several areas settled by Beaker Berbers in ancient times, from the southeast to the southwest United States, and in parts of Mesoamerica, the knowledge of how to manufacture alcoholic drinks persisted until historic times. While a kind of mead was the drink of choice in Europe, Indians of the southeast made a kind of persimmon wine, while cactus wine prevailed in the west (Waldman, 61). The manufacture of beer is, of course, a famous component of the Talossan-area economy even today, and citizens like Josh Macht with their home-brewed beer keep alive this ancient Berber art.
The scope of Berber maritime operations is breathtaking. Not only were Berber colonists sailing down the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and into the Gulf of Mexico to settle in Louisiana, but there was regular Berber contact with Central and even South America. Berber inscriptions are found on the Cape Verde Islands, far out in the Atlantic (Mercer, 64), while Berber potters brought their techniques to Central America. Pottery from El Salvador, dated to around 1500 BC, is virtually identical to Berber pottery of the same period found in Morocco, near the Canary Islands (Kennedy 1971, 270f).
There was evidently extensive Berber trading and settlement on both sides of Central America. Settlers speaking a Berber language were planted on the north coast of Honduras, where their language is called Jicaque. Others settled the south shore of Mexico, and the modern Tlapanec and Subtiaba Indians are their descendants. There was even an outpost of Berber-speakers on the Pacific coast of Colombia, whose descendants spoke a language known as Yurumanguí. The linguistic affinity of these languages will be discussed in Chapter 6, but for now, suffice it to say, the sudden expansion of thousands of Berber-speaking people into the New World leads historian Robert A. Kennedy to conclude that a single "Pan-Atlantic Culture" had arisen, which linked Spain, North Africa, and the western regions of Europe to the Caribbean realm and the eastern United States (Kennedy 1971, 271ff).
Coincidence? I Think Not!
After the Great Migration around 1500 BC, we are left with three large and substantial Berber groups in the New World. The first is a northern branch, which had settled around Lake Superior and Wisconsin in approximately 3000 BC. This is known to archeologists as the "Old Copper Culture"; its continuation, the "Red Ochre Culture," spread through Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana. There was also an equally thriving southern branch, settled around 1500 BC, in and around Poverty Point, Louisiana. Finally there were the small outliers, in southern Mexico, Central America, and Colombia, also representative of the second great wave of Berber immigration.
All these groups, no doubt, maintained some contact with their parent civilization, the Beaker Groups, back in Europe and North Africa. But after 1100 the Urnfield Celts invaded Spain and began eradicating the last Beaker civilization. Without a doubt, this disrupted what was left of the Beaker trade with the New World, and at roughly the same time, "for reasons not yet understood," the Isle Royale copper mines were abandoned and there occurred in the New World a notable decline in the use of copper to manufacture everyday tools (Bailey, 23; WA 67:227). Around Lake Superior, a focus of Berber colonization in those days, modern Ojibwe Indian legends say that their ancestors drove out a white race of miners (Bailey, 30ff). The Celts completed their task of wiping out the Berber Beaker culture by 700 BC, when the Las Cogotes culture was finally destroyed (Castro, 131-137). At exactly the same time--700 BC--the Poverty Point culture, that Berber Beaker trading outpost in the New World, also collapsed (Shaffer, 28ff), probably because it lost touch with the homeland and succumbed to Indian attack, or simply "went native." Its inhabitants seem to have dispersed to the west where they became the ancestors of the Tonkawa and other tribes of Texas.
The chronological "coincidences" are too much for chance. In both Europe and the New World, at the very same time, Megalithic cultures arise around 4500 BC; then on both continents, at the very same time, copper-using Beaker-inspired cultures arise in 3000 BC. Next, the Beaker Groups flee from conquest in 1500 BC, and their Beaker cultural traits begin to be widespread in North America; finally in both Europe and the New World, at the very same time, Beaker-derived cultures collapse in 700 BC.
But one New World Berber culture ultimately survived. The "Red Ochre" culture in Wisconsin kept on thriving (Mason, 224), and from it an indigenous, American Berber civilization was beginning to emerge, a culture which we can call Talossan. I can call it anything I want; after all, I discovere
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