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The Berber Project.

R. Ben Madison, M.A.

"The problem in archaeology is when to stop laughing."

—Dr Glyn Daniel, Antiquity, December 1961
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.
Talossa's ancestral myth 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 "civilisation" 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, therefore 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 sceptical 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 AD 498, the
coin is now in my personal collection. (Thanks to Sandee, who knows I need money.) This bizarre

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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 its present form the Berber Hypothesis rests upon two pillars: one which recognizes Talossa's
position as a small country in North America, and the other which accounts for Talossa's overwhelmingly
Germanic background. While Talossa has historically traced its mythological/historical origins back to the
ancient Berber peoples of North Africa, it would be a ridiculous denial of reality to reject the obvious fact
that Talossans are also of substantial Germanic heritage. After all, most Talossans are of German descent,
at least in part, and other Germanic nationalities, such as Swedish, Swiss, Norwegian, and English, have
also contributed to the Talossan gene pool. Most Talossans speak English, and the Talossan language is
loaded with German, Scandinavian, and English words. Talossan heritage organizations such as the
Talossan National Party have used German iconography very effectively and dramatically in expressing the
spirit of Talossa. And without the insistence on these facts from Talossa's German community, I would not
have researched the Berber-German connexion.
For many reasons, acknowledging Talossa's overwhelmingly German heritage is a "must" for the
serious anthropologist. However, the Germanic peoples themselves did not spring out of the north
European bogs without ancestors of their own, and this book will explore the question of Berber influence
on our direct prehistoric Germanic ancestors. To that extent I hope this book helps to harmonize what seem
to have been pro-Berber and pro-German camps, both sides unwilling to listen to what the other has to say.
Both, in fact, are right, according to the scholars, and 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 the Viking belief in a
heavenly afterlife called Valhalla, or Baal-Allah. Nor is there any necessary reason to insist that there must
be 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...
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

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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 (Letkowitz, 30ff),
much of whose 'research' borders on functional illiteracy. 1 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

1
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.

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 Between 12000 and 10000 BC, Berber-speakers had reached Tunisia where they established the
so-called "Dabba Culture" (McBumey, 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 Lingfüística
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 maţţa. 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, l94f).
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, l72f). 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 AD 200 (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, l02ff)! 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
The 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

4
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 Βαρβαροι, which
can either mean "Barbarians" or "Berbers" (the word is ambiguous; Sergi, 167). There is evidence that the
Etruscans were Berbers too (Sergi, l62ff). 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.

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 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, l68ff). 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-Indo-European language which may
have survived to the present day as Berber or as Basque" (Daniel, 131). Even sceptics 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 Almerian (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, l70f). 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,

Cheers! The Beaker Groups
According to V. Gordon Childe, the Almerian 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 Almerian cities (Trump, l52). 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 Almerians, in their
elaborate fortified centres; the two cultures then peacefully merged (Cunliffe, 256). Whatever the case,
early Beaker culture artefacts 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).

6
 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."
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 l971, 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 conquerors 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 civilisation, 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.

7
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 tǔul- 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 Afiica, "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 I975, 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
Andalusia (originally, "land of the Vandals"), and the dozens of names like Villagodos ("Gothtcwn") 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 civilisation 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, 103i). Edgar Polomé fmds it

8
"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 storey) qal'a (fortress, hill, citadel [Skomal, 223ff])
land (land, country) ła'nt (glassland, 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 Maine, 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
(Pokomy, 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" (Pokomy 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, alter the massive invasion of Indo-Europeans that came from the east. A culture
known to archaeologists as the "Únětice-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-

9
10
11
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 AD 14 (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 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 civilisation, 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

12
(Map 3): around 4500 BC a new culture known as the "Late Archaic" emerged "suddenly," with no
discernible predecessor. All its traits, including gorges, adzes, plummets, ground slate points and knives,
arbed 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, 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, Berber-centric 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, the 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's "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 artefact 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

13
copper artefacts—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 civilisations 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 artefacts, 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 Beaker Group Culture
(including "Red Ochre" phase) (especially in North Africa)
Arose ca. 3000 BC (WA 67:217) Arose ca. 3000 BC (Trump, 148f)
Flexed burials (WA 67:225) Flexed burials (Schutz, 120f)
Burial in mounds (WA 67:229) Burial in mounds (Cunliffe, 251ff)
Cremation (WA 67:225) Cremation (Schutz, 120f)
Burial with stone arrowheads (WA 67:221) Burial with stone arrowheads (Harrison 92ff)
Burial with copper daggers (WA 67:220) Burial with copper daggers (Harrison, 111)
Burial without pottery (WA 67:234) Burial without pottery (Mokhtar, 435)
Bow-shaped pendants (WA 67:219f) Bow-shaped pendants (Harrison, 51f)
Hunter-gatherers (WA 67:227) Hunter-gatherers (Harrison, 23 and 100)
Red ochre in burial (WA 67:229) Red ochre in burial (Camps 1961, 521ff)
Wrist-guards (WA 67:222) Wrist-guards (Harrison, 9)
Copper mining using fire and water (WA 67:220) Copper mining using fire and water (Schutz, 127f)
"Annealed" (tempered) copper (WA 67:220) "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 head-hunters. 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 artefacts" 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,

14
Michigan, Illinois and India.na 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, l73ff).
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, l:22lf; 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 many Indian tribes. Berbers also engaged in the same kind of "vision quest" commonly found
in Native American cultures (Herodotus, 4:l72ff). 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 begins with
startling suddenness (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 Mississippi, 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 artefacts 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

15
their descendants. There was even an outpost of Berber-speakers on the Pacific coast of Colombia, whose
descendants spoke a language known as Yurumangui. 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 archaeologists 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 civilisation, the Beaker
Groups, back in Europe and North Africa. But after 1100 the Urnfield Celts invaded Spain and began
eradicating the last Beaker civilisation. 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, 30ft). 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 civilisation was beginning to
emerge, a culture which we can call Talossan. I can call it anything I want; after all, I discovered it.

Chapter 5. The Dirt Age.

Diodorus Siculus
The umbilical cord between Europe and North Africa was cut between 1100 and 700 BC, but it
was revived from a different quarter, "under new management," after North Africa and the Iberian
Peninsula fell under the influence of Carthage—the great Phoenician colony and trading hub founded in
North Africa around 800 BC, which long battled Rome for dominance.
The Spanish Berber remnants of the Beaker culture, now mixed with Celtic or "Celtiberian"
peoples, began to trade with Carthage around 750 BC (Castro, l66). The remaining Berber economies such
as Talseia (or Tarshish) began to decline, and even while Poverty Point was fading back into the Louisiana
bayou country—and its inhabitants fleeing to Texas—Berbers returned to the New World in Carthaginian
ships to begin regular trade with the American Northeast. As early as 700, according to Harvard Professor
Barry Fell, Carthaginian ships began sailing the Atlantic to the New World (Fell 1976, l00-107).
Diodorus Siculus, an early Greek historian living in Sicily, records that Phoenician ships were lost
in the Atlantic during a storm. "West of Africa" they found "an enormous island that was fertile and finely
watered by navigable rivers." The Carthaginians made it home, and later on Carthaginian explorers

16
"reached this region and there made a settlement." Ultimately, however, the Carthaginian government
withdrew its support from the settlement and prohibited emigration to it, possibly to avert a population
drain (Fell 1980, 72f). Such a settlement, if it was actually made, would have been largely Berber in origin,
since wherever Carthaginians planted colonies, North African Berber speakers settled in huge numbers
(ELH, 475). Berbers in fact dominated both the Carthaginian infantry and cavalry, and were great guerilla
fighters (W annington, 46). Most Carthaginian coins discovered in America date to the 4th and early 3rd
centuries BC, indicating that this was the main period for Carthaginian trade with the New World.
Big Piles of Dirt: The Adena Moundbuilder Berbers
By 400 BC the Berber descendants of the Red Ochre Culture had expanded into what is now Ohio,
where Libyan Berber colonists were arriving in greater and greater numbers, perhaps to staff the trading
posts that sprang up in the river valleys east of the Mississippi, especially the valley of the upper Ohio
River in Ohio and West Virginia—probably the colony Diodorus Siculus wrote about. Beginning around
400 BC, a new, Berber-derived culture called "Adena" began to flower in Ohio (Shaffer, 6; Map 4). The
Adena folk emerged from the Berber-dominated "Red Ochre" tradition (Fagan, 369f; Kennedy l994, 14f),
the descendants of the very people whose ancestors had first mined copper on Lake Superior (Bailey, 30ff).
Political leadership in Adena was probably provided by Berbers from Africa.
The Adena were the first well-known "Moundbuilders" in American prehistory. Berbers, of
course, were moundbuilders (D'Ucel, 67), and mound-building was an important art in both their
Megalithic and Beaker phases. In Western Europe and North Africa, Berbers buried people in stone tombs
which were then encased in large earthen mounds (MacKie, 146). Across the Atlantic, this Berber custom
was perpetuated; many "moundbuilder" tombs are exactly the same plan, a rock tomb covered in an earthen
mound (Radin, 55). But most New World mounds are just earthen mounds, with no rock tomb inside. It is
interesting to note the east-west trend: In the non-Berber Eastern Mediterranean, notables were buried in
rock-hewn tombs with no earthen mound. Consequently, we find a geographic spectrum: stone tombs at
one end and earthen mounds at the other, with the compromise form—stone tombs inside earthen
mounds—in the middle.
At the same time, late European bronze age-style tools begin to appear in archaeological sites in
Ohio and Wisconsin (Fell 1976, 96). The historic copper trade apparently continued, or was revived;
copper ingots of identical "ox-hide" shape have been found in both the Old World and the New (Fell 1976,
165), providing evidence that from about 500 BC until 179 BC, there was a revival of the regular Atlantic
trade between the Mediterranean and North America, involving copper from Wisconsin, sent down the
Mississippi River, and out to Europe (Fell 1976, 106f). There were also Adena sites in Maryland,
suggesting traffic up the Potomac and Monongahela rivers from the Atlantic into the American interior
(Trigger, 29).
At about the same time (500 bc), Harvard Professor Barry Fell claims, waves of "Iberian Punic
Colonists" settled in North America (Fell 1976, l69ff). Fell relies chiefly on linguistic findings, especially
in the form of inscriptions. While we can usually trust Fell's identification of a particular alphabet, his
translations leave much to be desired. Fell is addicted to mixing and blending languages to suit his purpose,
and since he loathes footnotes, one is hard-pressed to verify his assertions. In Fell's world, languages are
never written in the right alphabet. Norse words are written in old Berber tifinagh script; Arabic is written
in ("vowelless") Irish ogam, and so forth. Many of his "inscriptions" are allegedly ogam, a secret "alphabet"
once used in Ireland and consisting mostly of vertical lines. It is quite easy to confuse hash marks or
plough-scratches for an ogam "inscription," and too often Fell attempts to translate 'words' which look like
///////////. The results, as you can imagine, are bizarre. (For the ogam controversy, see Fingerhut, Ch. 2.)
However, despite Fell's lapses in methodology, he does a real service in relating to us facts which
have been documented by others. In 1838, a Talseian (Iberian) inscription was discovered in Mammoth
Mound, an Adena site at Moundsville, West Virginia. It was immediately pronounced by French and
American linguists to be Berber, Libyan, or Numidian. The brief inscription explains that the mound was a
burial site for a notable named Tadach, and that his wife had it built in his memory. Similar inscriptions are
found in other Adena mounds (McGlone, 9ft). This and another nearby stone inscription were written in the
Punic language, in Iberian letters (Fell 1976, 157i). In Oklahoma, a Punic inscription—apparently some
sort of "hymn to the sun"—was discovered and dated to approximately the time of the first Carthaginian
arrival in the New World, while a nearby inscription in Iberian script marks the grave stone of a notable

17
named Haga (Fell 1976, l59f). In the Oklahoma Panhandle, the Anubis Caves site contains an inscription in
Libyan letters; Fell claimed this was "Arabic," but critics point out that it is in fact Berber (McGlone,
Chapter 7). Fell provides a chart demonstrating the Iberian/Punic alphabet found on inscriptions in Iowa,
Massachusetts, Lebanon and Spain (Fell 1976, 160).
Old World contemporaries saw America as simply an overseas extension of North Africa.
Herodotus describes "a place in Libya," beyond the Pillars of Hercules (i.e. past the Straits of Gibraltar)
where the Carthaginians traded for precious metals. He wrote that the local natives used smoke signals to
communicate over long distances—an obvious reference to the famous Native American custom
(Herodotus, 4:196). Later on, the Vikings, evidently on the basis of the profound and obvious similarities
between North American and North African inhabitants, languages and cultures, formed the impression that
North America was simply a peninsula of North Africa itself (Riley, 250; see illustration on back cover)!
It is possible that the Carthaginians brought corn (maize) back from America at this time, although
it failed to 'catch on' as a food crop. Maize was apparently well-known in North and West Africa long
before AD 1200, where pictures of it are found in local art (Fingerhut, l38ff; see illustration on back cover),
and it is a common staple in North Africa today (Hart, 33). The Mande (Mandingo) tribe of West Africa
have a creation myth, evidently very ancient, in which the creation of corn is an important part. They claim
that corn came from the west, from up the Niger River; other West African tribes have similar stories, and
claim that "yellow monkeys" (their politically correct term for White folks) brought it to them (Jeffreys,
29lff). The appearance of corn among the Yoruba seems connected to their supposed ancestor Lamarudu,
which is apparently a Berber name (Jeffreys, 293). Anthropologist M.D.W. Jeffreys suggests that "Arabs"
brought corn to West Africa, but as Raymond Mauny points out in a cogent rebuttal, the Arabs seldom
ventured out of sight of land and regarded the "Ocean of Darkness" (i.e. the Atlantic) with vague terror
(Jeffreys, 309). The last "yellow monkeys" to sail the Atlantic before the Age of Discovery were
Carthaginians and Berbers.
Corn was certainly the staple crop of the Adena, but their other agricultural products included
sunflowers, gourds, pumpkins, goosefoot (a kind of spinach) and tobacco. Still, much of their food was
attained by hunting and gathering in an environment which was still rich enough to support a sedentary
rather than nomadic lifestyle. Despite this limitation, Adena culture (Map 4) radiated from the Ohio River
Valley into territory that is now Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York. Adena
migrants, probably displaced by invaders, later settled in the Chesapeake Bay area and in Alabama as well.
There were trading networks centred on the Adena homeland, and Adena artefacts have even been
discovered in or around the Kingdom of Talossa itself (Pagan, 365).
Their high degree of social organization is affirmed by their earthworks. Conical and dome-shaped
burial mounds grew larger and more ambitious over the centuries. In the early stages of the culture, low
earthen hillocks were built up, basketful by basketful, over the burial pits of honoured individuals. Later,
high mounds were constructed over multiple burials, with the corpses usually placed in log-lined tombs.
Often these earthworks were surrounded by other earthworks—rounded walls or ridges of earth, usually
circular in shape and generally known as "Sacred Circles." The Adena also constructed earthen "effigy
mounds," in the shape of animals or symbols. The largest is the Great Serpent Mound at Peebles, Ohio.
This low, rounded embankment, about four feet high and 15 to 20 feet across, extends some 1,330 feet in
the shape of an uncoiling snake with jaws and tail.
Les Marabouts d'Afrique
The burial mounds themselves give us an exceptionally clear glimpse into the Berber identity of
the Adena culture and its successors. Adena was a religious faith; while the Indians had their "earth-bound
animal gods," Adena Berbers looked toward the sky (Hyde, 21ff). The "Sacred Circles" around the mounds
served as holy "meeting places" for people (Fagan, 364), and thus the mounds themselves served—in the
time-honoured Berber tradition—as maraboutic shrines. Like Adena society, Berber society in ancient
times (and even, in some places, today) was not an organized "state," but rather "a state of nature mitigated
by hereditary saints... anarchy mitigated by holiness" (Gellner, 35ff). The archaeologists tell us that the men
buried in Adena mounds were those who established their utility to the community through ritual powers
and mechanisms of economic exchange (Fagan, 363ff), just like the Berber marabout.

18
 The French term marabout refers to a Berber "holy man"; Berbers themselves use the word
agurram (the plural is igurramen). The marabout is a holy man with a holy genealogy, but genealogy alone
does not guarantee his holiness. He is holy if he has baraka—divine powers, "charisma" in the theological
sense. He has magical power, is good and pious, generous, hospitable and pacific. He accepts donations
from those who seek his blessing. The marabout is not a warrior, but he provides political leadership in
times of crisis or to resolve disputes between warring factions (Gellner, 74ff). This seems to be the precise
role of those who were interred in the Adena burial mounds, and because the burial place of a marabout
would preserve some of his baraka, or "holiness," it became a focal point for the community, a kind of
shrine for those who revered him and vowed to live by his example and keep alive his memory through tale
and song.
Berber religion from time immemorial—whether pagan, Roman, Christian, or Muslim—has
retained its inherent characteristics, like a tendency towards monotheism, the cult of a single great and all-
powerful deity. Coupled with this has been veneration for a host of lesser saints and holy men—marabouts,
or Christian martyrs. Seers, prophets and soothsayers had popular followings, and pilgrimages have always
been made to their shrines. Fatalism and a belief in the influence of evil spirits prevail as well, and Berbers
show great concern for the dead. Offerings are made for them, libations poured on their tombs, and feasts
for them are held in cemeteries today. People slept at the tombs of ancestors or marabouts in Herodotus's
time, in Christian times, and do so at the present day (Frend, 76ft).
This concern for the dead was central to the North American Berbers as well, in ways that clashed
with Native American cultures up to that point. Adena burial practices were a mixture of old and new;
bodies of the dead were often sprinkled with red ochre, a practice extending back generations through the
Old Copper Culture, all the way back to North Africa's Capsian period (Fagan, 362). Adena marabouts
were also buried with quantities of grave goods, the varying amounts indicating the either the social
inequalities in the culture, or perhaps varying degrees of baraka. Relics included engraved stone tablets,
often with raptorial bird designs; polished gorgets (throat armour) of stone and copper; pearl beads;
ornaments of sheet mica; tubular stone pipes; and bone masks. Animal masks are found in Adena sites, but
only in late Adena (Fagan, 365). This most likely shows an increasing "Indianization" of the culture. In
addition to these ceremonial and ornamental objects, the Adena people also made a wide range of stone,
wood, bone, and copper tools, as well as incised or stamped pottery and cloth woven from vegetable fibres
(Waldman, 19f).
The Adena civilisation prospered for five centuries, but in 149 BC, Rome and Carthage went to
war for the last time. Carthage withdrew the last of its merchants and was destroyed; contact with the New
World was cut off completely. Within a century, the Berber-dominated Adena culture, cut off from its
homeland, collapsed (Shaffer, 6). But it was not the end of Berber culture in America—far from it. The
stage was set for a fully indigenous American Berber civilisation to emerge: the Hopewell Culture.
Even Bigger Piles of Dirt: The Hopewell Moundbuilder Berbers
At the same time as the fading of Adena, around 100 BC, power in the Berber-settled Midwest
began to shift to a new force, a culture known to archaeologists as the "Hopewell" (Shaffer, 6; Trigger, 49).
Hopewell, whose base of operations was further west than Adena (see Map 4), but clearly grew out of the
Adena culture and absorbed the other descendants of the Red Ochre people who had survived in Wisconsin,
Illinois, and Indiana (Fagan, 369f; Kennedy 1994, l7). According to Barry Fell, the Hopewellians seem to
have been "mainly Libyans" of Berber stock, with, he suggests, some Negroid admixture (Fell 1976, 189).
The name "Hopewell" was imposed on these people by archaeologists. What did the "Hopewell"
call themselves? Talossans! According to one account, which is widely accepted as referring to the
Hopewell, the Lenapé (Delaware) Indians remembered encountering these moundbuilders during their own
eastward trek from across the Mississippi River. An eighteenth century missionary among the Lenapé
wrote:
"[The Lenapé] discovered that the country east of the Mississippi was inhabited by a very
powerful nation who had many large towns built on the great rivers flowing through their land Those
people (as I was told) called themselves Talligew or Tallegwi.... Many wonderful things are told of this
famous people. They are said to have been remarkably tall and stout, and there is a tradition that there
were giants among them, people of a much larger size than the tallest of the Lenape. It is related that they

19
had built to themselves regular fortifications or intrenchments, from whence they would sally out, but were
generally repulsed..." (Silverberg, 54f)
So the Hopewell called themselves Tallegwi. This is, of course, the same ancient tell or talo root
which is found in Finnish Talossa, the Talayotic culture of the Balearic Islands, and the Beaker cultures of
Toulouse, France. If any more proof were needed, it is this: The same Lenapé legend refers to these
Talossans both as Tallegwi and as Alligewi, with or without the initial T. This is a fundamentally Berber
phenomenon: in Moroccan Berber, for example, the name of the ethnic group is Amazigh, while the name
of the language is Tamazight. The T functions as an article or gender marker. The same grammatical feature
appears to be at work among the Hopewell: Alligewi = Amazigh; Tallegwi = Tamazight. This alternation,
with and without initial TI only makes sense in one human language, and that is Berber.
Hopewell possessed many of the same elements as Adena culture, but these were generally on a
grander scale—more, larger earthworks; richer burials; intensified ceremonialism; greater refinement in art;
a stricter class system and increased division of labour; and more agriculture. And the Hopewell culture
covered a much greater area, spreading from its core in the Ohio and Illinois River Valleys throughout
much of the Midwest and East—there was even an outpost at Marksville, Louisiana, not far from Poverty
Point. Moreover, the Hopewell Berbers established a far-flung trading network. At Hopewell sites have
been found obsidian from the Rockies and the desert Southwest, copper from the Great Lakes, shells from
the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, mica from the Appalachians, silver from Canada, and alligator skulls and
teeth from Florida. Like modern industrialized nations, the Hopewell purchased raw materials from their
primitive neighbours, then Hopewell craftsmen turned those materials into useful ornaments or tools, and
sold them back to the primitives at a profit (Fagan, 3721), All evidence implies that the "Hopewell
Interaction Sphere," as some archaeologists call it, spread not by conquest, but through trade and religion.
Hopewell is sometimes considered a religion as well as a culture. Hopewell marabouts probably had the
highest social ranking, with merchants and warlords beneath them.
Supporting even greater concentrations of people than the Adena Berbers, the Hopewell Berbers
depended more on agriculture and grew a variety of crops. Their extensive villages, usually near water,
consisted of circular or oval dome-roofed wigwams, as opposed to the round African-style huts used by the
Adena. This is probably evidence of a greater "Indianization" in Hopewell, and a greater willingness to
break with Old World Berber precedent. Hopewell Berbers, like the Adena Berbers, constructed a variety
of earthworks. Many of their mounds, covering multiple burials, stood 30 to 40 feet high. Large animal-
shaped "effigy" mounds often stood nearby, as did geometric enclosures. Some of these earthen walls were
50 feet high and 200 feet wide at the base. The enclosure at Newark, Ohio, once covered four square miles.
Hopewell Berber craftsmen mastered both the realistic and the abstract styles. The plentiful and
beautiful grave furnishings found by archaeologists include ceramic figurines, copper headdresses and
breast ornaments, obsidian spearheads and knives, mica mirrors, conch drinking cups, pearl jewellery,
hammered gold silhouettes, incised and stamped pottery, and stone platform pipes with naturalistic human
and animal sculptures (Waldman, 20f). The Hopewell also used pan pipes (Pagan, 45); we can only hope
their music sounded as beautiful as that of Perú.
Other North African connexions can also be demonstrated. A Hopewell mound at Davenport,
Iowa, contained a carving of an elephant—unknown in the New World, but remember Hannibal (Fell 1976,
188)! Experts on both sides of the Atlantic concluded that a nearby inscription was North African Berber
tifinagh (McGlone, 315ff). Other Libyan or Iberic inscriptions have been found in Tennessee, Arkansas,
and New Hampshire (McGlone, 237).

Chapter 6. Hopewell, Hohokam, and Hokan.

Morpho-Syntax
According to my hypothesis, the Moundbuilding Berbers would have spread their Berber-derived
language throughout Wisconsin, and in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys as far south as Memphis,
Tennessee. Do we find evidence of such a language being spoken by historic Indians in this region? No—
and for a good reason. In comparatively recent times, all of this area was overrun by two waves of invaders
from the northwest. Both the Siouans (Iroquois) and the Algonquians remember how they drove out "the
Snakes," the mound-building inhabitants of this country (Hyde, 54ff).

20
 Is there evidence that a Moundbuilder Berber language was spoken anywhere in North America?
Yes, there is! By comparing basic Berber vocabulary with vocabulary from dozens of American Indian
language families, I tried to see if one or more such families had any significant resemblance to Berber. It
was a long and frustrating search, as I meticulously and painstakingly compared wordlists from a dozen
separate American Indian language families with those of ancient and modern Berber. I found isolated,
chance resemblances here and there, but nothing systematic. I was most disappointed with Kwakiutl—a
language spoken on the coast of British Columbia, and in which I've had a longstanding personal interest.
In spite of a handfiil of accidental resemblances (Berber nëkk, Kwakiutl nugwa, "I") there is no real link
between any American Indian language and Berber... Except one.
Much to my surprise I could find no similarities to Berber anywhere in the Midwest. Instead, I was
forced to conclude that there is indeed a relict Berber population in the New World, but far away in the
desert Southwest—exactly where I least expected to find it. Their languages are known to linguists as the
"Hokan" languages (Map 5). Attempts to link Hokan to other American Indian language families
(especially Siouan) have all failed, and the vast majority of American Indian language specialists today
maintain that Hokan is not genetically related to any other family of languages in the New World, and that
any similarities are due either to coincidence or borrowing (Ruhlen 1991, 214ff).
Unlike such close-knit families as Algonquian and Iroquoian, Hokan is an ancient grouping of
several sub-families and isolated languages. Speakers of Hokan languages are spread through California,
Arizona, New Mexico, Baja California, Texas, and northern Mexico; with outlying groups in southern
Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia. There are no well-known Hokan languages, but
important ones include Karok, Pomo, Diegueño, Washo, Tonkawa, Havasupai and Maricopa—the latter
commemorated in Talossa's own Maricopa Province (Map 6).
Using wordlists and dictionaries, I was able to establish an impressive list of similarities between
Berber and Hokan (see Appendix). And I only picked words whose meanings in the two languages were
identical or very close. These include not just simple nouns, but also verbs, pronouns and numerals—the
kind of words that prove genetic relationship. There are hundreds of truly remarkable resemblances. Of
course, if you think this is all coincidence, simply compare the English words to the Berber or Hokan
words and find how many English words match up. Virtually none of them do. Why? Because English isn't
related to Berber or Hokan, but Berber and Hokan are related to each other. Certainly there must be a few
mistakes in my list; a few cases where I have overreached. However, even if only one of these words
proves Berber influence among the American Indians, it still proves it!
Using a standardized wordlist, comparing only modern Hokan with modern Berber, I was able to
make some calculations of glottochronology as well. Glottochronology is a controversial branch of
linguistics which postulates that languages change over time at a relatively constant rate. So, you can
simply compare two word lists, calculate the percentage of words they have in common, and tell
approximately how long ago the two languages separated from each other. The Berber and Hokan
vocabularies have 44 words in common, or 22% out of the total 200-word list. According to
glottochronology, this works out to a time-depth of about 50.2 centuries between the two. In other words,
Hokan and Berber were a single language until around the year 3024 BC, when they began to separate.
This is, of course, eerily close to the very approximate 3000 BC date when the Beaker Berbers established
their first colonies around Lake Superior. I conclude that Berber has been spoken in North America since
around 3000 BC, and that its modern descendants are called Hokan languages. I should add that after
making this calculation, I discovered that linguists tell us that the one, original Hokan parent language
began to break up into various dialects and new languages after 3000 BC (Langdon, 74). This is exactly
what my theory predicts.
Hokan-speakers are not only linguistically "different" from other American Indians, but
genetically different as well. In Cavalli-Sforza's massive sample, they seem to have coded as Caucasoids;
so he excluded the entire Hokan population from his sample and attributed this so-called irregularity to
"strong admixture" (Cavalli-Sforza, 321). Since most of the other Indian nations he included in his sample
had intercourse (in all senses of the word) with Whites much longer than the Hokans did, one would expect
their results to be even more skewed by "strong admixture." The more parsimonious explanation is that his
data are correct and that Hokans are Caucasoids.

21
 It has proven difficult to reconstruct a single "proto-Hokan" language, probably because "Hokan"
is a catch-all term including any New World language of Berber origin. Hokan languages probably
originated as trading languages, and Hokan was almost certainly a mixed language, born through the
process of "language intertwining," a phenomenon by which the morpho-syntax of one language (generally
speaking, that of the inferior status group) is merged with the vocabulary of another (generally speaking,
that of the superior status group). This would account for the lack of clear Berber grammar, but the
presence of Berber vocabulary, in Hokan languages. Such languages are often "in-group" languages, not
meant for outsiders. But some, like the "Media Lengua" of Perú—a fusion of Spanish and Quechua—are
ordinary day-to-day forms of communication, much as early Hokan must have been (Arends, Ch. 4). A
language very much like early Hokan is the Krōjo of Indonesia, which is "a language which is structurally
Javanese with as many Dutch words as possible" (Arends, 47).
I suspect that Hokan originated primarily as a women's language, among the Indian wives of
Berber mariners and settlers. The pronoun "you" is mi in Hokan, evidently derived from the Berber em,
which is a suffix used when speaking to women. If Berber settlers spoke "good" Berber to each other, they
spoke Hokan to their womenfolk, who in turn spoke it to each other. Eventually mi lost its gender
specificity and became the standard Hokan pronoun for "you." "Good" Berber died out, and the men went
over to Hokan, which had become the normal speech of the community. This is exactly what we would
expect if Hokan were carried to the New World by Beaker Berbers. In European Beaker society, it was the
men who travelled; they married women from the surrounding communities wherever they settled—who
would of course be different in each area where Beaker Folk were the newcomers (Harrison, 161).
There were three great branches of Hokan languages in their vast dispersion. One group consists
of those relict populations which were trading colonies or refugee outposts of Berbers planted around 1500
BC during the great surge of Berber migration to the New World. These outposts are clustered around the
coasts of Mexico, Honduras, Colombia and El Salvador. There was also apparently a pocket of Hokan-
speakers on Hispaniola, in the West Indies (see Granberry, in bibliography). The Salinan, Chumash and
Esselen languages of Califomia seem to be more closely related to these southern outpost languages, and I
suspect that they are another of these relict populations from the 1500 BC dispersal. Those settlements
further south represent other isolated outposts of the various Berber colonisations of the New World dating
back to 1500 BC, a time when North African influence on Central America has already been proven
(Kennedy 1971, 270f). Berber inscriptions have actually been discovered in Ecuador, not far from the
Hokan-speaking Yurumangui tribal homeland (Fell 1976, 184). Without a doubt the ancestors of our
cousins the Yurumangui made these inscriptions, thousands of years ago. No overland migration to or from
anywhere would leave such pockets of settlers scattered on the opposite coasts of two different continents
and the islands of the Caribbean; obviously these people came by sea.
Another group of Hokan Berber languages is the Coahuiltecan group, including Karankawa and
Tonkawa, formerly spoken in Texas and across the Rio Grande in Mexico. This group seems to be rather
divergent from the rest of Hokan, indicating a different history. I suspect that these languages are
descended from the Berber which was spoken in and around Poverty Point, in nearby Louisiana, during that
great colony's existence from 1500 BC till its collapse around 700. At its peak, Poverty Point itself had
more than 5,000 inhabitants—a huge number for prehistoric America—and probably thousands more in the
surrounding countryside. After the fall of Poverty Point, I suspect its Berber inhabitants fled to the plains
and coastal waterways of nearby Texas where they became the Coahuiltecans.
The remaining Hokan Berbers are descended from the first migration, which took place around
3000 BC, from Western Europe and North Africa to the Wisconsin region, and which later spread
throughout the Midwest. In places, they merged with the 1500 BC Great Migration population. This great
branch was responsible for the Adena and Hopewell civilisations. The remnants of their population are now
split into three distinct branches: l) the peculiar Washo of Lake Tahoe; 2) a "Northern" branch (including
Karok, Shasta, Chimariko, Yana, Pomo, and Palaihnihan, spoken in Northern California; and 3) a Seri-
Yuman branch (including Seri, Maricopa, Diegueño, Havasupai and Walapai) centred on Arizona and Baja
California. This relatively close-knit group of three branches represents, I believe, a direct migration from
the Midwest into the Southwest. All three groups may have been distinct in the Midwest long before they
went west. If Berber colonization of the West followed the lines of Greek colonization in the
Mediterranean, then Midwestern Berbers from one area would found a distant colony in one place, while
other Midwestern Berbers from another area would found a different distant colony in a wholly different

22
place. Moreover, each migration could have taken place at a totally different time, hundreds of years before
the next.
Maricopa, or, Why We Eat at Taco Bell
The Hokan Berbers of the American Southwest are not directly relevant to Talossan prehistory per
se, since they lived far away from our native soil. Nevertheless, as the only surviving Berber-speaking
nations of the New World, they form an interesting part of our heritage.
At some point, there was a mass migration of Hokans from their homeland in or near Wisconsin,
to California and the American Southwest. Exactly when and why this migration took place is a matter of
conjecture, although for many good reasons I believe that it took place in approximately 400-300 BC. This
was, I emphasize, a direct migration from the Midwest—in fact, from the Adena Culture itself. Harvard
Professor Barry Fell suggests that Libyan colonists migrated directly from North Africa to the area now
inhabited by the Zuñi, Pima, and Tohono O'odham (Papago) tribes at about the same time (Fell 1976, 169-
177). Although this seems unlikely, a mixture of two migrations could account for interesting similarities
between the Southwestern Hokans and North African Berbers (such as the use of adobe) which are hard to
account for if all the desert Hokans originated in the Midwest.
Evidence for a mid-western origin is reflected in the fact that Hokan tribes of the Southwest still
preserve cultural ties to the homeland. The Hohokam, a Hokan culture of the Mojave Desert, like later
Southwest tribes, ritually "killed" (broke) pottery placed in graves; this tradition goes all the way back to
the Berber Old Copper Culture of Wisconsin (Fagan, 42). Most southwestern tribes are matrilineal, but
Hokans are mostly patrilineal—just like the tribes of Wisconsin and the Mississippi valley (Waldman, 64).
Similarly, several Hokan tribes build domed dwellings of bark, mat, thatch, or hide (the so-called
"wigwam" or "wickiup"), just like the Indians of the Great Lakes region. Their neighbours, however, prefer
tipis, pueblos, or other kinds of dwellings (Waldman, 50).
As noted above, there are also profound similarities between the culture of the desert Southwest,
and that of Berber North Africa, which might indicate a more direct transfer of culture or population from
Africa to the Southwest. African Berbers use adobe and build large pueblo-style buildings (D'Uce1, 89);
indeed, it is difficult to tell from photographs whether a particular site is in Morocco or New Mexico! Both
the Southwest Indians and the Berbers used the same kind of outdoor earthen bread ovens (Hart, 39).
African Berbers practise chin-tattooing; so did the Hohokam culture of Arizona. The Berber "troglodytes"
(hole-dwellers) of some desert regions build underground dwellings similar to the Kivas and pit-houses of
the Southwest. Ceramic techniques on both sides of the Atlantic are the same; both groups lack the potter's
wheel and both use similar geometric designs. Both groups build reed boats rather than wooden ones to
travel on shallow rivers (Fell 1980, 239-254).
For the most part, the Berber settlers of the Southwest did not prosper; most were absorbed into
local Native American cultures. This is not surprising, since they were totally at the mercy of a new and
harsh environment and had to learn from their new neighbours in order to survive. Still, these Berbers
retained many Midwestern culture traits and some Hokan-speakers may have dim memories of their Berber
ancestry. The Karok tribe of California, for instance, believed that their creator, Pisivava, lived near a place
called the "Upriver Ocean" (Kroeber and Gifford, 88f). Perhaps this is a romantic image of Lake
Michigan—far "up river" from the Karok valley in northern California.
The only real Berber "civilisation" in the Southwest was called the Hohokam culture. "Hohokam"
strictly speaking refers only to the most advanced form of this culture, the primitive parts of which are
sometimes regarded as a different "Hakataya" or "Patayan" culture (Ortiz, 77f; 176). For our purpose we
shall regard both aspects—which stretched from southern California through almost all of Arizona and a
good part of the Baja—as a single culture, the Hohokam (Map 6).
At some time before 300 BC, a large group of Hokan-speakers from the Adena cultural realm set
out on a migration of approximately 2,000 km to the American Southwest. No one knows what compelled
them to undertake such a journey, but many Native American peoples made similar migrations to
California in ancient times. Small disconnected groups of Hokans from the Midwest, Athabaskans (Hupa)
from British Columbia, Penutians (Yuki, Wappo) from the Gulf of Mexico, Algonquians (Wiyot, Yurok)
from the northern prairies, all at one time or another broke off from well-established families in other parts
of the continent to seek their fortunes far away in the west.

23
 The Hohokam appeared suddenly around 300 BC in the river valleys of southern Arizona. Not
only were they one of the first agricultural peoples of the region, but they built an impressive system of
canals to utilize the available water (Ortiz, 78-81). Unlike all their neighbours, they cremated their dead—a
trait shared by the Adena, from whom they presumably came.
Like their Midwestern forebears, the Hohokam built wigwams, generally in pits to take advantage
of the cooler ground (Ortiz, 75). Early evidence for mound-building is circumstantial; Haury writes that
their successors have victory dances on natural mounds, "a signal of connections with observances held on
artifical [sic] mounds of old" (357). There are definitely artificial Hohokam mounds dating from after AD
550, and it is acknowledged that some may have been constructed earlier. The Hohokam, just like the
moundbuilders of the Midwest, enclosed ritual areas with palisades (Haury, 357).
Curiously, some Hohokam pottery contains painted letters, "resembling letters in the English
alphabet" (Ortiz, 81-84). Since ancient Iberian script and the "English alphabet" (actually the Roman
alphabet) are both derived from Phoenician, perhaps the characters referred to are Iberian or Punic. As we
shall see later, Punic writing was in use by Berbers in North America right up to the 19th century. I concur
with Barry Fell that "Libyan writing as well as Libyan language must once have been current in some
southwestern regions of North America" (Fell 1976, 191), but I do not believe that direct transfer can
explain every case. Instead, these are much more likely the artefacts of an indigenous, American, Berber
culture which had flourished since 3000 BC and which had been reinforced by more Berber migrants from
the Carthaginian Empire.
Many Punic and Afroasiatic terms survive in the languages of the Pima and Zuñi Indians of the
Southwest (Fell 1976, 169-177). Although these tribes were not Hokan, they could have been influenced by
the Hokan-speaking Berbers who settled around them. The Berbers were well known as a dynamic culture
even in Africa, and their culture and language radiated to the Black tribes who lived to their south (Fell
1980, 246). The same process could easily have occurred in the American Southwest. For his part,
Waldman acknowledges the possibility of "Libyan" contacts between the Mississippi Valley and the
Southwest, on the grounds of "language similarities" (72).
After AD 550, the Hohokam fell under Mesoamerican (Mexican) cultural influence, and began
building such things as ball courts, resembling those found further south. At this time, speakers of Uto-
Aztecan languages (the ancestors of the present-day Pima and Tohono O'odham) probably began
infiltrating Hohokam society and took on some of the accoutrements of Hohokam civilisation (Ortiz, 176).
After 1100 the Hohokam declined and contracted, possibly as the result of invasion from outside, or
because of overpopulation. "Puebloid" structures were erected in imitation of non-Hohokam cultures and
by 1450, when the Hohokam way of life seems to have given out, they were "no longer... truly Hohokam"
(Ortiz, 86ff). Their descendants are the modern-day Yuman tribes, including the Maricopa.
Although it ultimately failed, Hohokam civilisation endured for some 1,800 years and represented
"an amazingly successful effort to produce a good livelihood for a large population in the deserts of
southern Arizona" (Ortiz, 90). They are worthy cousins for Talossa, a fact Talossans have instinctively
sensed. Long before any scholarly link was made between Talossa and the peoples of the Southwest,
Talossans innately developed a southwestern orientation and proclaimed Taco Bell to be their "official
national cuisine." Taco Bell's corn tortillas, beans, and hot peppers recall for us our ancient Berber
ancestors, including even the Berber Adena and Hopewell moundbuilding cultures of our native soil.

Chapter 7. Aztalan.
Indians 1, Hopewell 0
Meanwhile, back in the Midwest, the Hopewell "interaction sphere" decayed and eventually fell
apart around 400 AD. Explanations for the collapse include overpopulation, wars, climate change, and
"cultural fatigue" (Fagan, 382ff). Both Iroquois and Algonquian Indian legends tell of wars against the
moundbuilders, whom they called "the Snakes" (Hyde, 54ff). An elderly Indian informant in the mid-
nineteenth century recalled that the "First Dispersion" of his peop1e—the moundbuilders—began in the
eastern United States, near the Alleghany Mountains of Pennsylvania (Salzer, 101); this may refer to the
break-up of the Hopewell "interaction sphere" (see Map 4). The Lenapé Indians, an Algonquian tribe living
in Pennsylvania, also recalled in the late eighteenth century that "many hundred years ago" their ancestors

24
25
26
indeed went to war with the moundbuilders in what is now Michigan, which would have to be Hopewell
country. Missionary John Heckewelder recounted this bit of Lenapé oral history in 1819, which seems to
describe the breakup of the Hopewell "interaction sphere":
"Having thus united their forces the Lenape and Mengwe [Iroquois?] declared war against the
Alligewi [Tallegwi, i.e. "Talossans"], and great battles were fought in which many warriors fell on both
sides... No quarter was given, so that the Alligewi at last, finding that their destruction was inevitable ifthey
persisted in their obstinacy, abandoned the country to the conquerors and fled down the Mississippi River,
from whence they never returned" (Siiverberg, 54f).
This is almost certainly an account of wars against the Hopewell by the Algonquians and Siouans,
both of whom were invading the American Midwest at this time. Especially interesting is the account that
the Hopewell fled south, down the Mississippi River, and never retumed, Perhaps they fled to the far
Southwest to join their Hokan relations in the deserts of Arizona.
Yet another possibility for Hopewell's decline is its isolation from the Eurafrican homeland. Only
a handful of Berber inscriptions have actually been found at Hopewell sites. It is likely that the Hopewell
civilisation became illiterate; at its final collapse, Fell postulates some kind of "slave revolt," in which "the
few literate aristocrats were eliminated" (Fell 1976, 189). This is not impossible; other Berber cultures
became illiterate as well. The ancient Berbers of the Canary Islands also had a written language but lost it
well before the fifteenth century European invasions. As with the Hopewell, "probably limited to an elite,
the knowledge [of writing] would have been vulnerable" (Mercer, 63f). Nonetheless, the Iberian alphabet
used in many of their inscriptions may have survived among some Native American peoples in the fomi of
the "Cree Syllabary," a system of writing which is usually thought to have been invented by Canadian
missionaries in the 19th Century. However, Cree tradition affirms that it was not invented by Whites, but is
rather indigenous. The script is very similar to ancient Iberian letters, and one Iberian inscription in Tolosa,
Spain, is strikingly reminiscent of the Cree letters (McGlone, 303ff).
The Moundbuilder culture which had originated in North Africa, and in Berber-speaking areas of
Western Europe, was about to experience its greatest accomplishments—but not among Berbers. Greek
culture reached its peak in the work of the Romans; Western technology's cutting edge is currently in J
apan. Similarly, in the middle of the first millennium AD, "foreigners"—non-Berbers—were admiring the
New World Berber way of life, and were about to carry that Berber-inspired culture to one last, spectacular
flowering in what moderns call the "Mississippian Tradition," or the "Buzzard Cult."
The Buzzard Cult, or, the Black Tortoise
Historians date the birth of the Mississippian Tradition to around AD 700 (Shaffer, 6). It was big
and important, but it was not directly connected with the Talossan Berber experience. It is part of American
Indian history, not Talossan history. Nevertheless, the Mississippian culture is the "Moundbuilder" culture
with which most Americans are familiar. Spreading out from its 'capital' at Cahokia, Illinois, the
Mississippian culture was a Native American blending of Berber and Mesoamerican (Aztec) influences
(Map 7). It was obsessed with death, and its artwork revels in skulls, bones, weeping eyes and other
symbols of doom; it has come to be known among anthropologists as the "Southern Cult," the "Death
Cult," or the "Buzzard Cult." According to one Native American tradition, the Buzzard Cult was known
among the Indians as the "Black Tortoise" (Salzer, 101). It featured a rigid caste system of priests and
nobles ruling over commoners (who were referred to as "stinkards"). Their mounds, which were immense,
were not used for burial, but rather as platforms for temples, in imitation of the Mexican pyramids
(Waldman, 21f). In its heyday, prior to about AD 1250 AD, the Black Tortoise civilisation was an
immense, centralized "empire," which overgrew the capacity of preliterate man to administer it. Like the
Roman Empire, it had to be broken up into "petty monarchies" which were easier to govern (Salzer, 101ff).
Like any number of "Third World" people who have a perplexing fascination with anything
European, these Buzzard Cult peoples—including the Natchez and the Muskogians—imitated anything
Berber they could find. To cite two amusing examples, when the Spanish conquistador Hemando de Soto
went rummaging through the Southeast around 1540, he found in Alabama a "Chief Cosa"—obviously
"chief of the Cosa"—ruling a territory near the town of "Talise"—again, obviously, "Talossa" (Albornoz,
304). The Buzzard Cult, which dominated much of the eastern United States from its capital at Cahokia,
Illinois, near St. Louis, survived into the eighteenth century in tiny pockets in the South.

27
 If the original Adena-Hopewell mound-building culture was in fact Berber, and spoke a language
(or languages) ancestral to What we now call Hokan, and if they exercised cultural influence on the
Buzzard people who spoke unrelated American Indian languages, then we should expect to find some
Hokan language influence on the Natchez and Muskogian languages spoken by Buzzard people. And this
is, not surprisingly, exactly what we do find. There are clear lexical links between Hokan and these
languages, though these languages are not directly related to Hokan (Langdon, 48).
Animal Shaped Piles of Dirt
As widespread or impressive as the Buzzard Cult was, it was not Berber, nor was it Talossan.
Instead, the Talossans of the Midwest—the ones who had remained behind alter the great migrations to the
Southwest—were about to enter upon the last phase of their existence, a period called "Effigy Mound" and
"Oneota" by the archaeologists. As Hopewell was declining, between AD 300 and 600 there appeared in
northwestern Wisconsin a distinct cultural tradition called the Effigy Mound, so named because these
Berbers built most of their mounds in the fonn of "effigies," shaped like animals, birds, or people (Hurley,
355; WA 67:283). The mainstream Hopewell built effigy mounds too, but this "fad" became much more
popular among the Hopewell of Wisconsin, from whom the Effigy Mound folk were descended (Rowe,
77ff). Implying foreign influence, Jennings refers to the Effigy Mound tradition as "anomalous" (Jennings
1974, 239).
From what we can tell, the Effigy Mound culture was in many ways a simpler variety of
Hopewell, and lacked several Hopewell traits. Persistent Berber elements of the Old Copper/Red Ochre
Culture, which had managed to endure all the way up to the formation of Effigy Mound, played a role in its
formation (Rowe, 77ff; WA 67:285ff). Early Effigy Mound sites indicate that these Berbers largely
reverted to a semi-nomadic, hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, but they may in fact have relied in some ways
on agriculture (Rowe, 64f; WA 67:290f). Their simple lifestyle could not sustain a great number of people.
For the whole of the territory occupied by the Effigy Mound Talossans-roughly the southern half of
Wisconsin—the population was most probably on the order of 3,000 people and produced a grand total of
about ten mounds a year (WA 67:285ff). In the Greater Talossan Area stretching from the coast of the
Talossan Sea to Madison, Wisconsin, there were some five "band groups" of Berbers, each with an allotted
zone of 50 or so square miles. They were small and unobtrusive cultures—and they were so Talossan that
they were even concerned with "territoriality" (WA 67:284)!
These early Talossans, who flourished in the area centred on Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota
between 300 and 700, often used simple rockshelters but also built "serni-subterranean" houses (Hurley,
355ff) akin to the Hokan pit houses of the desert Southwest. In later times, they preferred "arched and
gabled-roofed small rectangular houses," or domed circular wigwams, also similar to their distant cousins
among the Hokans in the desert Southwest (Mason, 356).
Effigy Mound Berbers often cremated their dead (as did the Hopewell) and buried them in
mounds. Like their Beaker Berber ancestors, these Berbers practised flexed burial (Hurley, 369). There
were no "cemeteries;" rather, mounds were erected in isolated areas. Men, women, and children were all
buried in mounds, a sign of egalitarianism; every known Effigy Mound burial is in a mound (Rowe, 66£f;
90). This probably shows that the burials had less "maraboutic" significance than the Adena or Hopewell
burials, and indicates that all the dead could expect a similar reward in the afierlife. It is likely that the
mounds were constructed once a year during spring or summer, when the ground was soft, and all those
who died during the preceding year would be interred during that season (Rowe, 89ff). The effigy mounds
themselves could be quite large—from 60 to 300 feet, although one was measured at 575 feet long. They
were constructed on high ground, ridges or bluffs overlooking rivers, streams and lakes (Rowe, 66ff). It
was common to bury stone altars with the dead in the mounds (Rowe, 73).
The mounds were shaped like panthers, bears, birds, deer, buffalo, turtles, dogs, and beavers; there
are also man-shaped, oval, conical, "hourglass," and odd-shaped "problcmatical" mounds (Rowe, 69). It is
important to note that the Effigy Mound Berbers built both effigy mounds and 'conventional' round
mounds, since examples of each are found on the native soil of the Kingdom of Talossa (see National Atlas
of the Kingdom of Talossa, Map 1.3). There are (or were) effigy mounds in Maricopa Province, and there is
still one circular mound in Lake Park in Vuode Province. It has often been suggested that the effigy shapes
were clan signs, and people were buried in mounds which corresponded to their ancestral clan lineage.
Rowe points out that none of the Algonquian or Siouan tribes in Wisconsin had the same combination of

28
clan animals as represented by the mounds (Rowe, 87f). It seems to me that this is confirming evidence that
Effigy Mound was not Algonquian or Siouan at all, but rather North African Berber.
Peter's Pence
Certain elements of the Effigy Mound culture indicate a new and benevolent influence from
abroad. Not only did the burials become more egalitarian (as noted above), but the Effigy Mound Talossans
abandoned the disgusting practice of head deformation (Rowe, 80). It was not only a simpler way of life
but a kinder and gentler one as well. There is evidence that Christianity made the difference—specifically
Donatist Christianity, the native Christian faith of North African Berbers, which the Roman Catholics
regarded as a "heresy." Donatism was obviously Christian (Frend, v) but was derided by its enemies as
"heathen" (Frend, 239ff). They believed their leader was a prophet (Monceaux, 4:157). They saw their
religious faith as a form of Berber nationalist revival (Frend, 105) and saw their own movement as the only
true Christian Church, denouncing all other Christians as impostors (Monceaux, 4:134). Their ritual
resembled that of Roman Catholicism (Monceaux, 4:134), but in other ways represented a retum to
"primitive Christianity" (Frend, 227). They were intensely devoted to the Bible (Frend, 3l8ff), featured
public confession of sin (Monceaux, 4: 148) and used North African language in their worship (Frend,
335).
At Figuig, in the mountains of eastern Morocco, an inscription in Berber script records that
Christian refugees had sailed to America. According to Harvard professor Bany Fell's translation, it tells of
a band of Christians who fled North Africa at some time afier the Vandals invaded North Africa in AD 429.
It records that "the Vandals, a contemptible race of no consequence," persecuted the "followers of the true
faith," who "fled into exile" and sailed away to "where the sun sets in the evening," reaching their
destination after a journey of many days. At least one of them returned to Africa to tell the tale (Fell 1980,
170ff). This agrees closely with the records of the Catholic Church, which reveal that in AD 502, there was
indeed a wave of Donatist refugees from Berber North Afiica, some of whom attempted to settle in Gaul,
where they were again repressed by the local Catholic bishop, "so as not to allow the African heresy to
plant itself in Gaul" (Monceaux, 4:103).
Did Donatist Berber Christians fmd refuge in the New World? There is evidence that these
Berbers reached Wisconsin and joined the Effigy Mound culture on Talossan soil. Circa 1987, Sandee
Prachel, a Talossan citizen, discovered a coin from the Byzantine Empire in Vuode Province (see
illustration of the coin on the front cover, figure 3). The coin is a copper follis, and was minted soon afier
498, during the early part of the reforms of the Emperor Anastasius, who reigned from 491 to 518. The
Donatist wave of emigration, which reached Gaul in 502, took place at exactly the time that this coin would
have been in circulation. It is only reasonable to assume that this same migration of Donatist refugees was
responsible for transporting this irrefutable proof of a direct connexion between the Mediterranean and the
very soil of the Kingdom of Talossa.
Christian thought and liturgy may have influenced different groups of Effigy Mound Berbers
differently. In the 19th century, for example, one lone Berber survivor, a man living among the Winnebago
by the name of De-coo-dah, rejected any offers from Catholic or Protestant missionaries, denouncing them
all as "double-tongued, double-faced robbers" and "impostors." De-coo-dah himself was not a Christian,
and "he seemed to shrink with terror" from the idea of no life after death; but William Pidgeon, the
archaeologist who recorded the final testimony of this elderly Talossan in the l840s, talked freely with him
about Protestantism, "with no apparent result" (Pidgeon, 146f). By contrast, Christian influence on other
Effigy Mound Talossans was profound. By the nineteenth century, traces of Donatist Christianity could still
be found among the handful of Talossan survivors that were still around at that time. The Kickapoo tribe of
Wisconsin was discovered in historic times to possess "prayer sticks," wooden slats with the Kyrie Eleison
inscribed in North Afiican Punic letters (of which more later). Apparently, they had been taught something
of Christian doctrine and worship by North African Christians. As late as the seventh century, African
Berbers were still building mounds of their own, so Berber refugees fiom North Africa would have felt at
home among the Effigy Mound folk. There is also evidence that some Talossans may have become
converts to the "Buzzard Cult" offered by Missisippian missionaries (WA 67:291).

29
"Allà, Salva la Menâ!"
But there is a very crucial piece of evidence for the presence of North African Christian Berbers in
ancient Talossa. Modern Talossans speak el Talossán, a Romance language derived from Latin (plus
assorted accretions). This has always been an embarrassment to the Berberphiles; after all, if Talossa is a
"Berber nation," why don't we speak a Berber language? This crisis in national identity can be easily
resolved if we can demonstrate that ancient New World Talossan Berbers also spoke a Romance language.
Did our ancient Talossan ancestors ever speak a Latin-derived language like modern Talossan? Evidence
shows that they did!
In the early 1840s an American archaeologist named William Pidgeon recorded two short
sentences in a nearly extinct language, remembered by an elderly descendant of the Moundbuilders living
in Wisconsin: "[H]e uttered a short sentence, audibly, but in a language unknown to me, 'Alla Sha-lah, lu-
lah; Alla Sha-lah, me-nah,' which being afterward interpreted, means in the ancient Elk language, 'Great
Spirit, save the king; Great Spirit, save the people'" (Pidgeon, 142).
Pidgeon couldn't speak a word of "the ancient Elk language" and was unfamiliar with its sounds,
but seems to have done a good job recording this phrase. It is Latin——the very kind of Latin we would
expect North African Berbers to have spoken. His recorded sentence preserves four "Elk" words: Alla, sha-
lah, lu-lah and me-nah. Each of them leads us back to North Africa. The first one is Alla, "Great Spirit" or
"God." While this sounds and looks Arabic, it could just as easily have come from Punic—the Semitic
language of the Phoenicians who ruled Berber North Africa for hundreds of years. Many North Africans in
Roman times spoke a hybrid Latin—Berber with Punic elements, as revealed in numerous inscriptions
(Adams 1994), and their hybrid language was spoken until well afier the Arab invasions (Tagliavini, 176).
The next word is sha-lah, "save." The form and meaning of the word indicate that it comes from
Latin salva, "save." Two sound changes prove that this is North African Latin. The change of initial "s" to
"sh" was typical in Africa. We know this from African Latin loanwords that are preserved in Berber; these
loanwords are extremely conservative and give us a good sense of what Afiican Latin sounded like
(Tagliavini, 176f). The Latin month of "september" has become "shetenber," for instance. So the change of
"s" to "sh" in sha-lah is just what we would expect. What of the disappearing "v" as salva becomes sha-
lah? This too is typical North African Latin. In Africa, the unstable Latin "v" sound (pronounced like
English "w") tended to drop out of certain words completely; thus Latin "avia" (grandmother) became "aia"
(Schuchardt 1918:46ff). So the change of salva to sha-lah is 100% what we would expect from North
African Latin.
Lu-lah, "the king," presents the most difficulty, but only at first glance. If this is indeed Vulgar
Latin, the lu- would be a definite article akin to lo (as in Provençal, or Old Spanish), leaving lah as the root
word, "king." Certainly in modern French, the phrase "le roi" ("the king") sounds a great deal like lu-lah to
the untrained ear. The change from "r" to "l" is also just what we'd expect from North Africa; the "r" and
"l" sounds were frequently confused by Carthaginians and Wisconsin Indians alike (Friedrich, 21f; Trigger,
585).
That brings us to me-nah, "people," which is extremely easy to identify. It is identical with the
Catalan and Provençal mena, "race (of people)," derived from Latin minera. The same word must have
survived in North African Latin as well; there were close ties between the Latin of Africa and that of Spain
(Tagliavini, 177) and of the south of France. Significantly, the modern Talossan language also has a close
kinship with Catalan and Provencal, and we may compare modern Talossan with "the ancient Elk
language" to show their obvious kinship:
Pidgeon's transcription: Alla sha-lah lu-lah; Alla sha-lah me-nah!
Phonetic realisation: Alla šalwa lu řà; Alla šalwa [la] mena!
Vulgar Latin: Alla salva lo roi; Alla salva la mena!
Modern Talossan: Allà salva e1 regeu; Allà salva la menâ!
In short, "the ancient Elk language" was North African Latin pure and simple, closely akin to
modern Talossan. The words, the phonetics, and the syntax are all Afiican Latin. It is nothing short of
astonishing that this half-remembered phrase in a half-dead language should have been preserved a
thousand years to be announced in print in the nineteenth century. But if "the ancient Elk language" was
Latin, what then was "the ancient Elk nation"?

30
The Traditions of De-coo-dah
We are fortunate that there may in fact be a written record of some of the events in the last,
temiinal period of Ancient Talossan history: a nineteenth century work in oral history called the Traditions
of De-coo-dah. In the spring of 1996, when I first began putting The Berber Project together, I was only
peripherally aware of the De-coo-dah story. I concurred with Robert Silverberg, who dismissed it as "a
crazy masterpiece of pseudoscience," the product of "the grand era of humbug" (Silverberg, 150). A year
later, however, I found an article by Robert J. Salzer, a respected anthropologist at Beloit College,
published in The Wisconsin Archeologist, which put the De-coo-dah question in an entirely different light.
The Traditions of De-coo-dah and Antiquarian Researches was published in 1853 by William
Pidgeon, an American businessman and amateur archaeologist who spent two years living with an elderly
Indian informant named De-coo-dah in western Wisconsin. Pidgeon's own editorializing is typical of his
era, with his talk about "the Roman, the Grecian, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Phoenician, the Dane, and
the Hindoo" migrating to ancient America (Silverberg, 137). But much of the book is simply a collection of
level-headed notes based on conversations with De-coo-dah, who explained to Pidgeon the ancient history
of his tribe, whom he called the "Elk Nation." De-coo-dah's account, according to Salzer, "conforms in so
many respects with general and sometimes specific interpretations concerning the culture history of the
northern midwestern United States that some modern archaeologists are currently proposing—
interpretat1ons which are based on the results of one hundred and fifty years of research that has been
accomplished since the publication of Pidgeon's book" (Salzer, 110, spelling corrected).
It is easy to make fun of Pidgeon's own theories; Silverberg describes his interpretation of the
Indian mounds (for example) as something "that for all its incoherence has about it the fascination of
lunacy, like some monstrous bridge constructed of toothpicks" (142). Thanks to Pidgeon's dated theorizing,
many have refused to take De-coo-dah's own testimony seriously. As Salzer demonstrates, this is both
unfair and unwise. Many events in De-coo-dah's story can be directly related to "the ethnogenesis of the
Oneota cultural phenomenon" (Salzer, 111). In the first draft of The Berber Project, I had already reached
conclusions about the terminal period in ancient Talossan history:
 The Talossan (Effigy Mound-Oneota) culture was of Old World origin.
 The Talossans originated in northern Wisconsin (from the Old Copper Culture).
 The Talossans had become extinct, but rerrmants were absorbed into the Winnebago tribe.
The Traditions of De-coo-dah backs up all three of my earlier conclusions. Evidence indicates that
the Effigy Mound-Oneota culture arose in northwestern Wisconsin around AD 300, and that it has as its
immediate predecessor the Hopewell culture (Hurley, 355). As we know, Hopewell itself traced its cultural
roots back to the Red Ochre peoples of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana (Fagan, 369f; Rowe, 77ff), who in
turn were descended from the Old Copper Culture that developed around Lake Superior as an outgrowth of
the Beaker Groups from Europe (Kehoe, 290f; Fingerhut, 49). The elderly De-coo-dah swore that "My
ancestors belonged to the Elk nation who came originally from the North, and once held dominion over all
this country, from the Mississippi, east and north, to the great waters" (meaning lakes Michigan and
Superior, Salzer, 101).
According to De-coo-dah, his Elk Nation was not "Native American" in the strict sense. He noted
that "the primitive Elk nation, originally a branch or tribe of the ancient American, had become mingled
and amalgamated with the race of red men from the south" (Pidgeon, 161). William Pidgeon, De-coo-dah's
amanuensis, recorded that the Elk Nation was "probably of European descent" (Pidgeon, 178), although he
points out in passing that De-coo-dah himself had a "complexion somewhat darker than the Winnebago"
(Salzer, 142), This is the sort of detail, of course, which Pidgeon would not have made up if he had wanted
to invent some Herrenvolk of Aryan Moundbuilders. De-coo-dah was a real person, and his Elk Nation,
known to most as "Effigy Mound-Oneota," were Moroccan Berbers.
There is of course one great question. How on earth did Berbers get identified with elk? There are
no elk in North Africa (certainly not of the American variety), The answer is so simple it will shock you.
Evidently the Elk Nation Talossans still called themselves "Berbers." In the Berber language, the word for
"Berber" goes back to time immemorial; Berbers called themselves Imazighen; Romans called Berbers
Mazices; Egyptians called Berbers Mashwash (Brett and Fentress, Sf and 22). These terms preserve the M-
Z-K root (Berber for "free men") which is the Berber name for themselves. If the Ojibwe Indians heard the

31
word Amazigh or its plural, Imazighen, it would have sounded to their ears very much like their own
Ojibwe word omashkooz, which happens to mean "elk." (Compare the English use of the animal name
"Frog" to refer to the French, due to its phonetic similarity to the word "French.")
So the translation name of "Elk Nation" appears to have been bestowed upon our spiritual
ancestors by the Algonquian-speaking Ojibwe people. Later on those Talossans began using the word
themselves, and De-coo-dah could speak of his extinct race, the Elk Nation, using the very term which a
century and a half later would prove once and for all the Berber origin of the American mound-builders, If
any African or Mediterranean people had referred to their own Berber neighbours as Omashkooz, nobody
would pay it any attention since it is so phonetically and semantically transparent. But put that same word
in pre-Columbian Wisconsin—and you have the makings of a typical academic pseudocontroversy!
According to De-coo-dah, there were two pivotal "Dispersions" that marked the history of the Elk
Nation. The second took place around AD 1250 and the first, some time before that. The First Dispersion
(of which De-coo-dah knew little) reportedly occurred in the eastern United States, near the Alleghany
Mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia (Salzer, 101), and may refer to the break-up of the Hopewell
and the rise of Efilgy Mound around AD 400 (see Map 4). But most of De-coo-dah's account can be related
to the story of the Effigy Mound culture itself, known in its later states as the "Oneota" culture to
archaeologists. Beginning about 700, perhaps as a result of the aforementioned infusion of Christian Berber
settlers from Africa, the Effigy Mound Berbers began to flower. The size and quantity of mound groups
being constructed increased, as did the quantity and quality of artefacts produced (Hurley, 365). Pottery and
lifestyle innovations culminated, as early as 800, in what is called the "Oneota" culture (Mason, 362; WA
67:316). Experts debate the relationship between "Effigy Moimd" and "Oneota" culture, whether the two
ought better to be thought of as a single culture with regional or class differentiations, whether one evolved
into the other (Hurley, 370; 388; WA 67:290) or whether they were two separate cultures that somehow
"coexisted" in the exact same territory (Mason, 354ff). Gibbon argues cogently that the two were a single
culture, the "Oneota" aspects arising in areas where increased com cultivation allowed for population
expansion (Overstreet, 23), Oneota Talossans munched on corn, beans, and rice—like modern Talossans do
today at Taco Bell—as well as squash, acoms, raspberries, and hazelnuts (WA 67:332f). The best known
and most impressive legacy of these Berbers is the great city of Aztalan.
Aztalan: Wargame Central of Pre-Columbian Wisconsin
Aztalan, easily the most impressive archaeological site in Wisconsin, is located about 100 km (60
miles) west of the RT-US border in American territory. Aztalan was a flourishing community from about
the year 900 until 1200, at which time all the inhabitants left; no one knows why. The walled city of
Aztalan itself covers almost nine hectares (21 acres); the surrounding area takes in an additional 60 hectares
(150 acres). The site is maintained as a state park by the Town of Aztalan, which has reconstructed a
number of the mounds. Oddly, the mounds were not used at all for burial, but more than forty of them were
scattered around the city (WA 67:354). The city may have reached a peak population at one time of 350
people (Richards, 392). Aztalan's most impressive feature was its extemal wattle-and-daub stockade, a wall
that stretched for half a mile around the village. Some scholars doubt whether the wall was a defensive
feature, and point out that walls can be built to keep people out, to keep people in, or to control the number
and type of people who go in and out (Aztalan, 11).
The name "Aztalan" is curious. Allegedly, it was given this name by N.F. Hyer, who named the
site after Aztatlan, the mythical place of origin of the Aztec Indians. Why he thought the Aztecs had any
connection to this site is unknown. I suspect local Indians related to him tales of the great Hokan Berber
migration to the Southwest, and Hyer believed this to be connected with the Aztec myths. It is also possible
that they told him the name of the site was Talan, a name which preserves the tala root. Since this is
vaguely reminiscent of Aztatlan, Hyer tacked on the "Az-" and created the hybrid form, "Aztalan." The
proper name of the village was probably just Talan. But this is all, needless to say, speculation.
According to some, Aztalan reflects a somewhat Buzzard-like religious orientation, and appears to
be in some ways a blending of Buzzard Cult and Effigy Mound cultures (Aztalan, 4). It was, however,
essentially an Effigy Mound Berber site, despite speculations as to its origin (Hurley, 394). Some of its
founders may have been "political refugees" from the Buzzard Cult realm (Salzer, 101). Aztalanic
influence—in the form of pottery design—radiated all over Wisconsin (Hall, 1:117). Much is ballyhooed
about the supposed evidence for "ceremonial cannibalism" at Aztalan (WA 67:353); if it actually occurred,

32
there is no evidence that the Talossans were responsible; the site was also inhabited by Buzzard Cult
missionaries (WA 67:291). Aztalan remains the single most impressive Berber site within easy driving
distance of the Kingdom of Talossa, and for that reason we should revere it.
Between 1000 and 1300, Talossan culture attained its last great flowering, during its Oneota
period. Map 7 illustrates its enormous extent. Most Talossans had a seasonal lifestyle, gathering into
villages for the spring and summer, but reverting to less sedentary patterns during the winter when game
was scarce; Fish, beaver, and waterfowl were the dominant staples (Overstreet, 39). Some of the larger
villages were semi-permanent, maintaining a continuous settled population for periods of up to 15 years.
These villages were great conglomerations of nuclear family dwellings, mostly mat-covered wigwams with
a few walled structures. Whole villages were surrounded by wooden walls or defensive stockades
(Overstreet, 40; Mason, 362). Larger villages may have contained as many as 70 or 90 people (WA
67:330); Aztalan was even larger and even in 1836 the remains of more than fifty buildings were visible,
arranged into streets (WA 67:345). Most Oneota villages, such as the one at Carcajou Point, Wisconsin,
traded extensively with their neighbours (Overstreet 46ff). When not otherwise occupied by work or
warfare, these ancient Talossans may have indulged in the modern Talossan pastime of wargames: "gaming
pieces" and "counters" have been found in Oneota archaeological digs (WA 67:326)!
There is no telling how many Berber artefacts at Aztalan were destroyed by treasure-hunters. In
1838 Edward Everett, Governor of Connecticut, besought the President of the United States to withdraw
Aztalan from sale as a piece of public land, but in vain; it was sold at $1.25 an acre and the Federal
Treasury was thereby enriched by a whopping $22.00. Then the settlers started ploughing and sowing
turnips on the mounds. About this time, some artefacts of silver were found, resulting in a mad rush of
treasure-hunters, who dug up the mounds and walls. Parts of the site were "almost obliterated" (WA 8:32).
The vandal tradition continues into our own day; an Aztalan Talossan Berber house was reconstructed in
1972 but was burned by Cestoûr terrorists a year later (WA 67:358).

Chapter 8: Last of the Fallen.

"The Last Dispersion"
According to De-coo-dah, the downfall of the Talossans and the "Last Dispersion" of the Elk
Nation began around AD 1250 (Salzer, 101). All the archaeological evidence supports his memory. As
noted above, the magnificent city of Aztalan was abandoned around that time, but worse was to follow.
Around 1300, all across North America, there was apparently a wave of disease or famine unprecedented
and unmatched until the age of Columbus. From the desert southwest clear through the "Buzzard Cult"
heartland in the Mississippi valley, a large population simply disappeared. Cahokia and the entire region at
the junction of the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi were evacuated, leaving a desolation that
archaeologists call the "Vacant Quarter" (Kennedy 1994, 20).
Against that background we can better tmderstand the calamities that befell Talossa during the
thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. William Pidgeon recorded De-coo-dah's account of what he called the
Second Dispersion of the Elk Nation, which took place during and alter a civil war fought to the south, in
the Buzzard Cult or Black Tortoise Empire. His story tells of civil strife "during the reign of the great De-
co-ta, who was a usurpcr, descended from the Black Tortoise nation, which came from the south."
Assassinations, fratricide, the destruction of dynasties, all mix in a tale "which is somewhat diminished by
its incoherence" (Silverberg, 146). According to De-coo-dah, dynastic wars in the Black Tortoise empire
spilled over into the domain of the Elk Nation in Talossa, which had become tributary to the Black Tortoise
which was ruled from Cahokia. Eventually, the Elk Nation was caught up in the fratricidal wars between
rival claimants to the Black Tortoise throne, and was broken up into four petty states in Wisconsin. After
the death of De-co-ta II, the last emperor of the Black Tortoise, the entire Buzzard Cult society began to
revert to the primitive, less organized structure of the "Vacant Quarter" which we find in the historical
record (Salzer, l01ff):
"Shortly after De-co-ta himself died of wounds inflicted by the Red Deer [the "king" of one of the
petty Elk Nation states in Wisconsin], leaving no male issue. He was deposited with his fathers, and his
command was ruled by chiefs, aided by prophets [marabouts]. Thus ended the reign of the sovereign De-
co-tas, and thus began the rule of prophets. The subjects of De-co-ta divided into independent bands,

33
sustained their nationality for a long time, retaining many of their ancient customs and ceremonies"
(Pidgeon, 166).
Archaeologists confirm that atter about 1300, the Talossans also went into decline, and lost the
bulk of their territory, probably to Siouan (Iowa, Winnebago) invaders from the west. Talossan civilisation
retreated into Greater Talossa, including the Fox River Valley and the area from Waushara County
southwards—approximately the south eastern third of Wisconsin (see Map 8). Their culture maintained its
high standards in this period, despite its restricted range (Overstreet, 42). There were, nevertheless, great
changes; perhaps as a result of intermarriage with Native Americans, the traditional Berber patrilineal
system began to break down, and the more "Indian" matrilineal descent system was introduced around 1300
(Overstreet, 46ff). These changes took place against a backdrop of steady prosperity, however. Talossan
villages at this time were large, and the population farmed extensively, mainly corn. Villages were
occupied for long periods of time, as demonstrated by their extensive trash heaps (Overstreet, 43).
All these observations are oonfirmed by De-coo-dah, whose account of the territorial break-up of
the Elk Nation matches exactly with the archaeological data. According to De-coo-dah, the last mound-
building was carried on by one of the Elk 'micronations' located east of the Wisconsin River and including
the territory of the modern Kingdom of Talossa (Salzer, 106). This petty state, ruled by Little Otter and his
descendants, later split into two smaller states; social complexity and population declined. Eventually, "a
gotterdämmerung of the Mound Builders became inevitable; in a final conflict the quarreling chiefs
destroyed one another and the survivors dispersed in small tribal bands." This event took place, Pidgeon
writes, shortly before the landfall of Columbus in the last part of the fifteenth century (Silverberg, l46f).
De-coo-dah gives this final verdict on the death of his culture:
"After this final dispersion of the northern tribes, monumental commemorations ceased. The
mound being the hieroglyphic sign through which the traditions were taught, and the knowledge of past
events preserved, gradually losing its importance, came eventually to be looked upon with cold
indifference. And thus the great fountain of tradition being dried up, it is by no means [a] matter of wonder
that its streams have ceased to flow" (Pidgeon, 169).
The Elks' Club: Mascouten = Imazighen
The central historical question of Talossan archaeology must be, where did the Talossan Berbers
go? Who these Elkish Talossans were, and where they went, is a total mystery to most archaeologists
(Hurley, 399). Certainly many if not most fell victim to the European diseases which reached America afler
I492; Shaffer points out that by 1550, much of the Mississippi watershed (including most of the Talossan
Berber realm) was "devoid of people" (89). But if De-coo-dah is right, then following the breakup of the
Elk Nation around 1490, the Talossans "dispersed in small bands" to join one or another of the
neighbouring Indian tribes (Pidgeon, 169). One such band or tribe may have preserved its identity into
historic times, in the form of a "mysterious" tribe of Indians called the Mascouten (Trigger, 671). The name
"Mascouten" is (like almost everything else about them) controversial. The Huron called them "People of
the Place of the Fire" or "Fire Nation" (Atsistarhonon), while some Algonquians called them "Prairie
People" (Trigger, 671f). But their original name Mascouten is clearly identical to the Berber Imazighen, the
Latin Mazices, the Egyptian Mashwash and the Algonquian Omashkooz—in other words, "Berbers" or "Elk
Nation."
Tracing the history of the Mascouten Berbers is difficult. In the early seventeenth century, when
French records become available, groups of Mascouten could be found in southern Wisconsin, northern
Illinois, eastern Iowa, northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan. In spite of numerous efforts to locate
them entirely in Michigan prior to the Iroquois wars of the 1650s, the earliest Jesuit records place
Mascouten in Wisconsin in 1634, long before the Iroquois wars. The French report that the Mascouten
joined with forces of the Fox, Kickapoo, Miami and Ottawa Indians against the Winnebago in the Green
Bay area and contributed to their downfall (Trigger, 668ff; Hall, 153; Baerreis, 267).
Were these "mysterious Mascouten" really the Moundbuilders? According to the Indians, they
were. Schoolcraft indicates that the Mascouten were, or had been, Moundbuilders. He obtained evidence of
this from the Ottawa Indians of Michigan, who "invariably referred to the Mascouten when questioned
about ancient bones and caves, in the region of [Mackinac ].... The Ottawas attribute to them the small
mounds and the old garden-beds in Grand River Valley, and at other places; in short, they point to them for

34
whatever in the antiquities of the country they cannot explain or account for" (Baerreis, 266). That the
Mascouten were 'different' from their neighbours was noted by the French in 1671, when they recorded that
the Mascouten and those who associated with them were "more civilised and gentle" than the Indians
(Baerreis, 271).
According to De-coo-dah, ancient Talossans had "dispersed in small bands to join one or another
of the scattered tribes" about the time Columbus landed in the New World (Pidgeon, 169). The historical
record confirms that the Mascouten tended to attach themselves to a bewildering variety of other tribes
(Trigger, 668). Clearly, though, the Mascouten were the original inhabitants of the Kingdom of Talossa, the
last of the fallen Moundbuilders, who preserved their ancient Berber name into historic times. Jean Nicolet,
writing in 1638, reports that the "Rasaouakouetons" (Mascouten) were living in Wisconsin, along the shore
of Lake Michigan (JR, 18:231). In other words, on the very soil of the Kingdom of Talossa! In 1679 there
were reportedly 20,000 Mascouten in Wisconsin, comprising "as many as 12 nations" or tribes (JR,
61:149).
In 1680-81, Father Zenobius Membré, exploring the coast of Lake Michigan with the great French
explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle, recorded in his joumal that he had located "the nation of the
Maskoutens" along with some Fox Indians "at about 43° north, on the banks of the river called Melleoki
[Milwaukee], which empties into Lake Dauphin [Michigan], very near their village" (Jones, 8f). And
although he is confused about their history, La Salle himself says that the entire Greater Talossan Area was
thickly settled by Mascouten (Jones, 11f). The Mascouten—Imazighen, "Berbers"—were the earliest
recorded inhabitants of the Kingdom of Talossa. In 1698 they were reported to have constructed a "fort"
somewhere in or near Talossa, which one anthropologist attempts to dismiss by claiming it was the work of
French traders for whom he has no evidence whatsoever (Jones, 13f). This was obviously a typical
Mascouten Aztalan-type palisaded village, such as the French encountered on the Fox River near Green
Bay, where one Mascouten town had some 3,000 inhabitants (Baerreis, 270, Trigger, 668).
Throughout the entire historic period, it must be remembered, the Mascouten Talossans were a
declining people. Potawotami hidians were spreading south from Green Bay into the vicinity of Talossa
after 1680, moving in on the Mascouten. Little is known about Talossan history in this period because the
French voyageurs bypassed Talossa to the north and the south, largely ignoring the territory of the
Kingdom (Jones, 13ff). But some details are known. Mascouten leaders signed a peace treaty with the
Iroquois in 1701 under French auspices, and many Mascouten rushed eastward to resettle fertile lands in
Michigan. Here in 1712 the French, Ottawa and Potawotami Indians attacked a settlement of Mascouten
and their allies in the Detroit area, and "hundreds" of Mascouten and Fox Indians were killed (Jones, 18ff).
The Mascouten retained their base of power around Talossa however, and in l721 they were reported to
inhabit the entire country between the Fox River of Wisconsin and the Illinois River (Jones, 20f).
For one reason or another, the Fox Indians—who had long been the allies of the Mascouten—
succeeded in drawing the Mascouten into several disastrous wars with the French, and in 1728 the French
launched a military expedition against the Fox in the vicinity of Talossa which completely destroyed Fox
influence there (Jones, 21f). The Mascouten then formed a league with the Kickapoo and in 1735 both
groups settled en bloc along the Illinois-Indiana border in the vicinity of the Wabash and Vermilion Rivers,
where they managed to play the French and English off against each other and maintained their
independence. Although there were still Mascouten trading in Green Bay as late as 1757 (Jones, 25), the
Potawotami moved into Talossa between 1750 and 1769 and completely drove our Berber Ancestors out of
Wisconsin (Jones, 29 and 36). Afler the Seven Years' War the Mascouten Berbers of Indiana swore loyalty
to England but refused to fight the Americans during the American Revolution. In 1788 they were still a
separate nation, some of whom used to travel to St. Louis to get presents from the Spanish. But by 1813
they were reported to have been incorporated with the Kickapoo, their constant associates during the
preceding century, and in 1825 mention was made only of the Kickapoos, "of whom one tribe was called"
Mascouten (Trigger, 669f).
Donatism Rules! Wooooh!
The original language of the Mascouten is "virtually unknown," but on the basis of nothing
whatsoever it is usually assumed to be a dialect of Sac-Fox-Kickapoo (Trigger, 668). This may arise from
the fact that by the late seventeenth century the Mascouten were able to understand and communicate in
Kickapoo, after hundreds of years of acculturation and assimilation (Baerreis, 252ff). In reality, according

35
to the French missionaries, the Mascouten Berbers spoke three distinct and different languages (JR, 6l:l49).
This is, of course, highly significant, as we would expect them to speak three languages: Kickapoo, Berber,
and North African Latin!
Other elements of Mascouten society also reveal their Berber heritage. Unlike De-coo-dah's
branch of the American Berbers, the Mascouten may have preserved elements of Donatist Christianity as
part of their core belief system. It will be recalled that the Effigy Mound culture seems to have been
transformed by a migration of Donatists from North Africa in the early Sixth Century; and we know that
the Moundbuilders eventually became the Mascouten tribe of Berbers. No sooner had the Mascouten tribe
amalgamated into the Kickapoo, when a "new" religious movement began among the Kickapoo, called the
"Kenekuk religion," afler its founder, a Kickapoo (Mascouten?) prophet named Kenekuk.
Rather than seeing Christianity as something Whites could give to the Mascouten and Kickapoo,
Kenekuk taught that his people had originally been Christians but had allowed their Christianity to fall to
pieces. "Shortly after his return, sometime in 1815, the Kickapoo Prophet began telling his people that they
had wandered far from God's teachings. For this reason the Great Spirit had abandoned them, and they had
been defeated and dispersed in wars and had lost valuable lands" (Herring, 27).
Kenekuk"s teachings bear an amazing resemblance to those of Donatism. Both were obviously
Christian (Herring, 34f; Frend, v) but were derided by their enemies as "heathens" (Herring, 35; Frend,
239ff). Both believed their leader was a prophet (Herring, 26ff; Monceaux, 4:157). Both saw their religious
faith as a form of nationalist revival (Herring, 27; Frend, 105). Both believed their own movement to be the
only true Christian Church, and denounced all other Christians as impostors (Herring, 27f; Monceaux,
4:153). Both had a form of ritual resembling that of Roman Catholicism (Herring, 29; Monceaux, 4:134),
but in other ways represented a retum to "primitive Christianity" (Herring, 29; Frend, 227). Both Donatism
and Kenekukism preached hell-fire and darrmation (Herring, 31; Frend, 138) and both were severely
penitential (Herring, 31; Frend, 20). Both were intensely devoted to the Bible (Herring, 30; Frend, 318ff).
Both featured public confession of sin (Herring, 31; Monceaux, 4:148) and both used North African
language in their worship (Fell 1980, l74; Frend, 335).
The most dramatic proof that the Kenekuk religion was a form of Donatist Christianity is the use
of Punic-language prayers among Kenekuk's followers. The Punic language, of course, died out more than
a thousand years ago in North Africa; but when the Donatist refugees left for America in the early sixth
century, it was very much alive in North African cities like Carthage. And, most amazing of all, the
language was still in use over 1,300 years later in the fused Maseouten-Kickapoo tribe in North America.
The Kenekuk religion used "prayer sticks," wooden slats carved with pictures and letters. These
were used like the Catholic rosary, as a mnemonic aid to remember set prayers (Herring, 32ff).
Significantly, surviving examples of these prayer sticks were painted green and red—the national colours
of the Kingdom of Talossa (Trigger, 663)! The characters on these Talossan-coloured prayer sticks are of
even greater interest, They are unifonn; every prayer stick has exactly the same characters, divided into
three groups of five letters each. Each group has the same five letters, which are almost perfect
representations of characters from the North African Punic alphabet (see illustration):
These characters read, from lefl to right, NQT'L (the apostrophe ' is a sound in the Punic language,
like a catch in the throat). Supplying the appropriate vowels—Punic shares the ridiculous Semitic defect of
not writing its vowels—allows us to read the text clearly. The text on the Kenekuk prayer sticks reads, in
Punic, naqethi 'êl, which, literally translated, means "Declare [me] to be exempt from punishment, O God"
(Holladay, 15; 245). A less literal translation would be, simply, "Lord have mercy." And this is, of course,
the ancient Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison (Greek for "Lord have mercy") which is repeated three times in
the Liturgy, just as on the Kenekuk prayer sticks. The translation is authentic; l checked it myself.1
Significantly, nineteenth century eyewitnesses to Indians using the prayer sticks noted that the chanted
prayers were "all apparently unmeaning" (Herring, 34). Which of course they would be to nineteenth
century Indians (or Americans) if they were being recited in fifth century North African Punic!

1
The idea was originally suggested by Harvard Professor Barry Fell (Fell 1980, 174), who unfortunately
misidentifies one of the letters and arrives at an erroneous translation.

36
ABOVE: Kenekuk prayer stick from the early 19th
century. Engraved is a group of five North African
Punic letters, repeated three times. The dots appear
to be ornamental. The picture shows a native church
and a field of corn. The prayer stick was painted
green and red. (Source: Herring, p. 33)

MIDDLE: Closeup of the five Punic letters,

photographically reproduced from the Kenekuk
prayer stick. The letters read, from left to right,
NQT'L. Decorative dots have been removed for
clarity.

BELOW: The same five letters, NQT'L,

photographically reproduced from actual Punic texts
found in the Mediterranean area. (Source: Daniels
and Bright, p. 93) The text reads, in Punic, naqethi
'êl. This is translated "Declare [me] to be exempt
from punishment, O God." The equivalent of the
Greek Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison.
It is clear from the record that long before Kenekuk actually revived his religion, the Mascouten
and Kickapoo peoples practised Christian prayer and ritual in ways that resembled Roman Catholicism. All
the while, they "consistently rejected the overtures of Catholic and Protestant missionaries" (Herring, 28f).
Because he rejects the Donatist Berber hypothesis, Herring is forced to explain this contradiction away by
claiming that the eighteenth-century Jesuits failed to convert the Kickapoo to Christianity, but for some
reason the Kickapoo embraced Catholic ritual and were still practising it a century after they "lost contact
with the priests" (Herring, 29). It makes more sense to conclude that the Kickapoo (via the confederated
Mascouten) had a form of Christian teaching and ritual that pre-dated the unsuccessful Jesuit attempts to
win them over to Roman Catholicism.
The Kickapoo confederacy, which included the last native Talossans of Talossa, was itself broken
up and dispersed in the nineteenth century. Several groups emerged, including a resolutely pagan branch
that moved to Mexico and a largely Americanised group that still identified with Kenekuk and settled in
Kansas. Neither group preserves any conscious trace of its Mascouten ancestry; they have lost their
Talossan Berber heritage.
Rally 'Round the Flag: The Berber Roots of El Bicoloreu
The evidence of the Kenekuk Prayer Sticks, the De-coo-dah transcription, and the Vuode Province
fillis coin all indicate that North African Berbers settled in ancient Talossa. But is that all the evidence?
Remember that a Donatist-period inscription in Morocco claimed that Donatists had sailed to the New
World and settled here. Presumably these Donatists would have come from Morocco, the coasts of which
were Roman, Vandal, or no man's land in those days. But where exactly in Morocco did they come from?
Interesting evidence points to the Atlantic port of Salé as their port of origin—and that evidence is the
Talossan flag! In 1979 the Kingdom of Talossa adopted its first national flag, a white-green-red horizontal
tricolour, coincidentally the same as Bulgaria. However, by 2 March 1981, this flag was felt to be
somewhat artificial, and was replaced by a simpler bicolour, El Bicoloreu, consisting of a band of green
above a band of red. This is the flag we use today. Could El Bicoloreu also have ancient Berber roots?
Talossa's national colours—green and red—do indeed have ancient Berber roots. Red (kermes)
and green dye are common in Berber rugs and carpets, and red and green are used for a variety of motifs on
Berber blankets, cloaks, and tent-partition cloths. Tuareg blankets feature "slender short lines of red and
green" as decoration; the same colours are also used in Berber embroidery (D'Ucel 156, 167ff, 176, 190).
Evidently, the use of red and green banners for political purposes was common among Berber
peoples of North Africa as well. An unnamed Franciscan friar who visited "Tripul of Berberia" in North
Africa around 1350 reported that region using a banner depicting a green palm tree and red keys
(McCandless, 370; 393). Even more significant is the banner of the former Berber settlement of Salé, on

37
the Atlantic coast of Morocco near Rabat, at the mouth of the River Bou Regreg. The city may date from
Phoenician times (Punic selâ, 'cliff') and was also a Roman outpost. But Salé is best known as one of the
greatest Berber strongholds in history, and significantly it lay (until very recently) within the Tamazight
Berber-speaking area—one sub-tribe of which call themselves the Talesinnt, or "Talossans" (Abdel-
Massih, xiii).
A no man's land afier the Vandals seized control of the rest of North Africa after AD 429, the Salé
region was home to one of the innumerable Berber kingdoms that sprang up as Rome declined. After the
advent of Islam, the Berbers of the Salé region organized the "Kingdom of Tamasna" (a name which
sounds distinctly familiar!) on the Moroccan coast. The Kingdom of Tamasna translated the Qur'an into
Berber and, according to M. Talbi, "It was here that Berber nationalism was carried to the extreme."
Nearby, ex-Christian Berbers organized a separate "Kingdom of Tlemcen," another familiar-sounding name
(El Fasi, 251). These Islamic Berber kingdoms warred against their pagan neighbours in the earliest days of
Islam in Morocco (Brett and Fentress, 91). Salé eventually became famous for its coinage under the
Almoravid Empire, the first Berber state to conquer Spain (El Fasi, 400), and later became a key city under
the Almohads (ca. 1130-1250), a Berber empire which ruled much of Morocco, Spain, Algeria, Tunisia,
and Libya. The Almohads built a great Islamic monastery at Salé (Julien, passim).
As late as the 18th century the Berbers of Salé had not submitted to Arab rule (Julien, 268), and at
the same time, English adventurer John Beaumont visited them. This was during the period when the
infamous "Salley Rovers," Arab and Berber pirates based in Salé, dominated piracy in the Atlantic Ocean,
raiding as far as Iceland. What Beaumont discovered there is almost beyond belief. As he reported it, the
inhabitants of Salé used a "flag of unique design" but which Talossans would find most familiar: It was a
simple banner consisting of a top stripe of green and a bottom stripe of red! The flag is identical with that
of the modern-day Kingdom of Talossa, except that it is defaced with three small discs, one yellow and two
white, arranged in a triangle (McCandless, 371). Beyond a doubt, the basic colours and pattem of the
Talossan national flag—el Bicoloreu—have roots among the Berbers of North Africa. And it is no surprise
to discover that both Morocco and Algeria—the two most heavily Berber countries on the face of the
planet—both use green and red in their national flags, just like Talossa.
If Berbers were going to leave for the New World, the port of Salé is the place they would leave
from. If our North African Donatist refugees came from Sale and brought with them the native banner of
their city, it would explain a great many things about the ancient Talossans of North America. As we saw
above, the Berber followers of the Prophet Kenekuk used wooden "prayer sticks" like rosary beads in their
religious worship. These sticks represented the "implicit cultural nationalism" of Kenekuk's people
(Herring, 27ff). And, as noted before, these "prayer sticks," symbolic of Berber nationalism, were painted
green and red (Trigger, 663), exactly like the Talossan flag. But this Berber green-and-red symbolism
manifested itself in other ways as well among the native inhabitants of Talossa.
Among the several Indian tribes passing through Talossa in pre-colonial times was an Algonquian
tribe known as the Fox. These Indians formed a very close alliance with the Mascouten Berbers around
1720 (Baerreis, 276). It is interesting that since that time, although the Fox have remained "one of the most
primitive people in the American Midwest," they have also been recognized as a flag-bearing people.
Terrell writes that the Fox "carried flags made of feathers" (Terrell, 239f). The Fox (today amalgamated
with another tribe, the Sac, or Sauk, as the "Sac and Fox Tribe of Indians") have a flag of their own, "of
simple design, but complex meaning" (Healy). Their flag is familiar to all Talossans—it is identical to ours!
According to Don Healy, the bicolour design "naturally, invokes the idea that these two nations have come
together as one people," but this is coincidental; it was not designed to symbolize this union and may
predate the union. Instead, the green symbolizes life, peace, spring, and the hereditary "Peace Chief," a kind
of king. The red stands for death, war, the autumn, and the "War Chief," who would lead the tribes in time
of war. "In the olden days, when war was imminent, the tribal calumets, or peace pipes, would be stripped
of their traditional white feathers and replaced by red feathers" (Healy).
Did the Fox Indians get their flag from the Mascouten Berbers, who got it from the Moroccan port
city of Salé? Long before modern Talossans were even aware that the Fox Indians existed, they had already
set down the meaning of their own national flag, which had an identical design. The green was said to be
symbolic of the King, prosperity, and magnanimity; while the red was symbolic of tenacity—and is flown
on top during times of declared war (1988 Constituziun, Article 6; 1997 Organic Law, Art. 2, Sec. 7). If we

38
found some natives on an isolated atoll in the South Pacific flying the Stars and Stripes, it would be a good
bet that there had been American influence there at one time. If we find an Indian tribe flying the same
banner as Moroccan Berbers, the conclusion is equally obvious. These "coincidences" are simply
overpowering.
We can therefore conclude with reasonable certitude that the ancient Berber peoples of North
Africa used the colours red and green to symbolize their national identity and culture. These same colours,
integrated as a green-and-red bicolour flag in the Berber port city of Salé, were carried across the Atlantic
Ocean by Donatist Christian refugees around AD 500, who settled in Wisconsin and who were among the
ancestors of the Mascouten Berbers. This same green-over-red design was appropriated on the one hand by
the Fox Indians, and on the other by the Kickapoo Indians who followed a Donatist prophet called
Kenekuk. Finally, in 1979, the Kingdom of Talossa was also drawn to those very same colours, evidently
as a result of some forgotten cultural association or genetic Berber predilection. It is all nothing short of
amazing.
Great-Grandsons
After their "final dispersion" the North American Berbers scattered in many directions and united
with many diflerent peoples. De-coo-dah claimed that some of the "Elk nation" headed into the eastern part
of the United States after AD 1250, settling in the region of the Alleghany Mountains (Pidgeon, 1611). And
we learn that there was indeed a mysterious tribe called the "Tomahittans" (Tamazight?) living in the
Alleghany as late as 1674. Significantly, they spoke an unknown language (Trigger, 587 and 638).
Other Talossan Berbers stayed closer to home, uniting with the Winnebago Indians, a Siouan tribe
from the west that had migrated into the Green Bay area of Wisconsin. There was obviously intense
cultural contact between the Winnebago and the Talossans. An example can be seen on the cover of this
book: Figure 1 shows a prehistoric Berber pot bearing the distinctive emblem of Tanit, the nurturing
mother-goddess of the Berber people. Figure 2 shows the very same emblem, but this time found centuries
later on a Winnebago Indian mat. Obviously the Winnebago derived a part of their culture from Berber
influence. It has been proven conclusively that the Winnebago did not build Talossa's mounds (Mason,
364). But there was evidently a comiection between Talossans and Winnebago. There is or was an Elk
"clan" within the Winnebago nation, and its legends seem to suggest that the Elk "people" were at some
time separate and that they later joined up with others at the Red Banks of Green Bay to contribute to the
fonnation of the Winnebago nation. The Winnebago never really accepted the ancient heritage of the Elk
nation, and dismissed the ancient traditions of these last pitiful Talossans as "idle tales" (Pidgeon, 146). But
perhaps De-coo-dah's reference to a former splintering of the Elk Nation to live with their relatives after
their final dispersion refers to the same circumstances described in the Winnebago Elk clan origin myth
(Salzer, 112). Significantly, there was considerable intennarriage as well between the Winnebago and the
Mascouten (Baerreis, 276).
The last of the fallen was De-coo-dah. He was born around 1751; no one knows where. "De-coo-
dah," says Pidgeon, "was of low stature, unusually broad across the shoulders and breast, his complexion
somewhat darker than the Winnebago, with a large mouth and short chin; his limbs were well-proportioned,
and he possessed undaunted courage." His ancestors, it would appear, were Berber marabouts: "he claimed
no lineal kindred with any nation now in existence, but was a descendant from the Elk [i.e. "Berber"]
nation, now extinct; that they were a mixed nation, claiming descent from those ancient Americans, the
mound-builders; and that their traditions were sacredly kept by their prophets [marabouts], from a family of
whom he was descended." De-coo-dah was also known as "Mockingbird," for he was fluent in five
languages including the "Elk Language," a form of North African Latin akin to modern Talossan. He
regularly travelled among several tribes, including the Winnebago, and passed on to William Pidgeon the
knowledge of his Berber heritage he had learned from his great-grandfather, who had died when De-coo-
dah was in his early twenties, before the American Revolution (Silverberg, 142).
When De-coo-dah himself died in 1842, he was interred in a burial mound west of Lake Superior
(Silverberg, 148). He was hardly the last Berber Talossan. Only fourteen years later, a young Swedish
immigrant named George Madison—a descendent of the Maglemose Berbers of Mesolithic Europe—
settled not far away, in northwestern Illinois. His great-grandson founded the Kingdom of Talossa.

39
 Conclusion.
Our Berber Ancestors...
 Settled North Africa from the Middle East about 12,000 years ago, where they...
 Evolved into the snail-eating Capsian culture, radiating into Spain and beyond, and...
 Spread into Northern Europe to form the Maglemose Culture of Scandinavia and Germany,
which...
 Fused with lndo-Europeans to create the Germanic peoples, from whom most of us are descended;
 Developed the great Megalithic culture after 4500 BC, whose monuments are found all over
Western Europe, and...
 Ventured to sea, as far as New England, spreading Megalithic Berber culture;
 Organized the Beaker Culture in Spain, which united Western Europe's chalcolithic economy,
and...
 Sailed to America and ran the copper trade with Europe between 3000 and 700 BC; many settled
here and...
 Developed the Old Copper Culture, characterized by many undeniably Berber characteristics; this
culture...
 Evolved into the Adena and Hopewell Moundbuilders, who called themselves the "Tallegwi," and
who were...
 Reinforced by more Berber migrants during the Carthaginian period who left several written
records and...
 Helped organize huge migrations of Berbers from the Midwest to the desert Southwest, where
they...
 Became the Hokan tribes of Indians and had food remarkably similar to our modern Taco Bells;
 Founded the puritanical Donatist sect of Christians in Carthage, North Africa; groups of
Donatists...
 Fled persecution in North Africa in the year 502, embarking fi'om the Moroccan port of Salé,
and...
 Sailed the Atlantic to Wisconsin, where they flew their Moroccan green-and-red flag, and...
 Dropped a Byzantine coin dating to approximately AD 502 on Farwell Avenue in Vuode
Province, then...
 Merged with their Hopewell brethren on Wisconsin soil to create the Effigy Mound culture,
which...
 Spoke a Latin-derived language incredibly similar to modern Talossan; these Effigy Mound
people...
 Built the city of Aztalan, where they used "gaming pieces" and "counters" to play wargames;
eventually they...
 Evolved into the Oneota culture whose history was chronicled by its last surviving historian, De-
coo-dah, and...
 Survived into the early nineteenth century, where their last Mascouten (Imazighen) Berber
descendants were...
 Ultimately absorbed into the Winnebago and Kickapoo tribes...
 Where they imparted their last relics—Donatist Christianity and a North African alphabet—
before...
 Losing 5,000 years of Talossan Berber identity...
 But only temporarily, until 1979.
What does it all mean?! All across the world today, nations of immigrants are reaching out to
their aboriginal inhabitants for cultural stimulus. Canadian products use Eskimo names to be fashionable;
the Australian government is debating whether to use Aboriginal designs on its new flag, and puts that
weird-sounding Aboriginal bamboo pipe music in its tourism commercials; American states and cities by
the hundreds have Indian names, and their inhabitants insist that the "Atlanta Braves" and the "Marquette
Warriors" are meant to honour the unbowed spirit of those who came before. There is no good reason for
Talossa to be any different. We are inexplicably and inextricably connected to Berbers, for better or for
worse. It's part of being Talossan. I, for one, think it's neat. Berber, Maglemose, Megalithic, Beaker,
Germanic, Adena, Hopewell, Effigy Mound, Oneota, Hohokam and Mascouten artwork and customs are

40
out there waiting for us to use, to build our own unique national identity. Laugh or genuflect; this ridiculous
fusion of Talossans and Berbers is very much a part of that identity. It is such an oddball association that
even if it is not true, it ought to be.

Appendix: Hokan is Berber!

A. Summary: A comparison of lexical reconstructions in Proto-Hokan (PH; Kaufman 1988 and
Leshchiner/Nikolaev 1992) and Proto-Afroasiatic (PAA; Ehret 1996, and others) reveals a significant
number of possible cognates in pronouns, numerals, grammatical markers and other basic vocabulary.
Additional possible cognates suggest themselves from modern Hokan and Afroasiatic vocabularies. More
than 450 such cognates are presented, with tentative sound correspondences. A hypothesis is offered to
explain how an Afroasiatic language came to be spoken in the Americas.
B. Thesis Statement: The Hokan languages spoken in North and Central America are Afroasiatic and
represent a direct derivation (possibly creolised?) from Berber.
C. Pronouns. Reconstructed PH contains a variety of pronoun forms which resemble Afroasiatic forms,
and a variety which do not. Those which can be linked to Afroasiatic are presented below.
First Person Singular: PAA Vn or 'Vn is attested in Semitic as 'n, in Cushitic as 'âni, and in Chadic as na
"I." This corresponds well to PH nyi ~ nya which is widespread in Hokan. A separate PAA first person
singular form (y)i also occurs, usually as a bound form. This is identical to PH i "first person singular
pronoun marker" (also a deictic).
Second Person Singular: Afroasiatic has a variety of forms denoting the second person singular. The
dominant second person marker in PH is mi ~ ma which resembles similar forms found in other Native
American languages. However, the root m is also found in Afroasiatic, in the form ëm (second person
singular feminine possessive marker) in Berber; the gender distinction is lost in Hokan.
Third Person Singular: The most basic form in PAA is (i)si, "he/she/it." It can be compared with the PH
demonstrative sV. However, the most widespread Hokan third person pronoun form is ha ~ (h)U found in
multiple branches of Hokan. This is identical to PAA ha "this/that one" (use of demonstratives as third
person pronouns is global; cf. English he from Proto-Indo-European ko "this one"). A third PAA form for
"this, they, he" is m(w) which corresponds exactly to Hokan mE "this."
First Person Plural: The first-person form wa ~ wë plays both singular and plural roles in Afroasiatic
(Bomhard, 66ff). It is identical to PH wa ~ wi "first person singular/plural pronoun marker."
Second Person Plural: The prototypical PAA form is kuuna (usually bound). Compare PH qhV "second
person plural pronoun marker." Reduction of kuuna to k(u)n was common in Afroasiatic and the further
loss of final n is characteristic of Hokan (see under Sound Correspondences, below).
Third Person Plural: Most likely the original PAA form for "they" was suppleted by other forms. However,
it is possible that the PAA form (u)su "they" was interpreted in Hokan as (h)Uš(i) where (h)U is "third
person pronoun" and š(i) is reanalyzed as "dual and plural of noun/pronoun." The generic Hokan
pronominal plural š(i) might itself be a reduced form of PAA (u)su "they."
D. Numerals. Basic numerals have been reconstructed for PAA as a whole from 1 to 4, and also for PH as
a whole from l to 5 (but with severe regional cleavages). Links between PAA and PH are suggested below,
but except for "one," "five,"' and possibly "three," the entire Afroasiatic numeration system has been
replaced by Native American or substitute PAA forms. This is typical of Berber, the suggested parent of
Hokan; Berber languages tend to replace most numerals with loanwords (Penchoen, 24).
1. PH še "one" corresponds to Berber iš "one" (Chaouia Aït Frah dialect; compare Omotic is "one"). The
change from VC to CV syllable structure is typical of PAA>PH.
2. PH haqhu "two" is phonetically close to PAA hwâk "increase in size, volume, extent; grow on top; far"
(semantics: grow on top>additional>two; cf. Latin secundus, "second," literally "following").
3. The normal PAA word for "three," xaynz, may be related to PH xa "first half of 'three' (in compounds)."
PAA łâb "to grow, increase, add on" corresponds to PH lAP "three" (note semantic shift). PAA kum "a
large number; to add together" also resembles PH qhamHE "three."

41
5. PH šimA "five" is practically identical to Berber sëmmus "five." Loss of final s would be typical (see
Sound Correspondences, below).
E. PAA-PH Comparisons. Below is a list of reconstructed PAA forms (left) with possible cognates in
reconstructed PH forms (right), ordered numerically from Ehret's PAA reconstructions. PH forms are from
Kaufman except those from Leshchiner and Nikolaev, which are starred (*). PAA definitions are those
which Ehret provides for any Afroasiatic daughter language. Fanciful or improbable semantic connections
are, thereby, excluded from this list, at least on the PAA side. In a handful of cases two PH (or PAA) words
are paired with a single PAA (or PH) word if I am unsure as to which is a more likely cognate. From any
variant forms or definitions, I have chosen the variant that best illustrates the relationship. For the
significance of the double-dagger (‡) see below under Observations.
0002 ba "no; negative" pa "negative"
0004 boγ "to hit" Pakyh "to hit"
0009 bôoh "to flow" Pa "to flow"
0010 b-j "seed" *bëčë "service berry; wildplum
0011 bâk "burn, roast" (i)pIK' "burn, be ripe, cooked"
0011 bâk "dawn, be bright" paq "to bloom"
0017 buł "skin, flesh" *bole "cheek"
0017 buł "skin, flesh" pi "skin"
0018 bân "give birth" *bënu "belly"
0022 bir "to burn brightly" pily "burn, be hot; heat"
0028 boots "ashes; bright; white" *mpåšó "black; yellow; blue, green"
0029 box "to swell" pxu "to swell"
0032 baayn "grindstone" PaN "pestle"
0038 ba' "to lie down" pá "to lie down; put; fall; throw"
0042 pâh "to take into the mouth" pa- "with the mouth
0043 pâh "break" pa "break, hit"
0052 poor "to speak" po "to shout, holler, call; speak, say"
0053 pas' "to light up; to cook" (U)pis "to smoke; tobacco"
0057 pax "to turn" *pEqE "to turn"
0057 pax "thigh" *mbak'ë "buttocks; back"
0057 pax "bow (for arrows)" Paxu "bow (for arrows)"
0059 piiz "limb; knee" pAča "knee; leg"
0061 pâ'r "to dig up" ip'er "to dig"
0064 pû' "to spill; waterfall" *pVHa "to spill; rain"
0065 âf "mouth" aphu "mouth"‡
0066 fi "to go out" phi "to go"
0067 fic' "to rub" fis "to rub; touch"
0078 faak "break open, cut apart" PaK "burst; cut"
0080 fal "accomplish; do" fal "fight" (cf. English "finish off")
0085 fir "to flower, bear fruit" *POrV "chokecherry; Calif. huckleberry"
0088 fât' "to excrete; urine" fåt'u "penis"
0088 fât' "to excrete" phet "fart; skunk"
0094 fiz "to swell" peT "swollen"
0099 fuu' "to close" *(SV)PHü "to close"
0100 p'ac' "clitoris" *bečhVdV "vulva"
0101 p'ûc' "much; many; increase" *Ip'et'V "much; fill; be crowded"
0104 p'ad "break off" PaT "break, crack"
0105 p'oh "to be wide" pač' "wide, broad; far"
0106 p'ih "buttocks" pi "buttocks"
0110 p'ał "to break by hitting" Pál(a) "to push, knock; shoot"
0111 p'uł "to fool; to deceive" *pulHV "true" (inversion of meaning!)
0117 p'u' "to cut into" pu "to plant; dig; hoe"
0125 dug "black" TaK' "black oak"
0132 dîk "to pound, hit" t'iK "to kill; to shoot"
0138 duł "to beat, punch" toLi "to beat, strike; hit"

42
0141 dûm "to leak out" cum "to flow; creek, river"
0145 dap "to experience; to touch" *TåPV "to know, believe" (semantics: surety)
0153 daw "to go" -Tu "to go and do [+verb]"
0158 da' "to call upon, call to be on guard -ta "polite imperative" (suffix)
0160 tâ "to be hot" Tu "hot; burn"‡
0167 tak "pierce with sword" t'eK "kill, shoot, cut"
0169 takw "to descend, go down" TaK "to hang"
0172 tuul "rise, heap; esteem" thuL "old" (risen/esteemed>old)
0176 tar "to shake" TaTa "to shake" (reduplication?)
0178 ter "earth, dust" t'a(s) "dust, dirt, sand"
0181 za "something (indef. pron.)" ši- "derivational noun prefix"
0182 zâb "grasp, hold in" šap "to cover"
0187 zagw "to sit; stay in place" ču "to sit, dwell, lie on ground"
0191 zooγ "embrace, carry" č'ak "to close"
0191 zooγ "to move (tr.); squeeze out" ša "move a long object; poke hole"
0196 zal "break off; pluck" C'al "break, split, squeeze"
0199 zîn "lie still" čan "to float; bathe"
0199 zîn "to sleep" šima "to sleep"
0203 zots "stick out; mountain" coc' "breast"
0204 zaax "cold" ašče "cold"
0206 za' "to be held; be grasped" ča "to tie"
0208 zaa' "to rend, tear" ča "to bite"
0209 si "he/she/it" sV "demonstrative"
0215 suk' "excretion, secretion" *išwújë "fat, grease"
0218 sil "to run out (fluid) ši'lya "milk; breast"
0218 sil "to run out (fluid) ša:ly "to leak"
0219 sim "to hear" *šimálV "to hear"
0220 sim "name" si "name"‡
0222 sûn "to urinate" su "to piss"
0226 sap "hit repeatedly" šaP "put out a fire" (semantics: stamp out?)
0230 sir "root" san "edible root"
0233 sâx "to scrape" acexi "to scratch"
0240 t'ab "to cover" šap "to cover"
0244 t'ôγw "to be wet" *čhVQajV "damp"
0244 t'ôγw "to be wet" (i)taky "rain"
0246 t'ih "to burn up" ši "hot like chili peppers"
0249 t'ah "to understand" ša "to not know" (irony?)
0251 t'ûł "star; to glow" *čwóHrá "moon; sun"
0254 t'eer "long; deep; come from afar" To "long, tall; far"
0255 t'ir "strand; hair" (a)súL "string"
0261 t'e' "to lack" ša "to not know"
0265 gûd "big, great" *qUdV "good" (semantics: cf. Eng. great)
0273 gûf "to bend" *KëPV "to bend"
0274 geh "to speak" kwa "to talk; say"
0275 guh "big" KU "big; long, tall"
0280 gim "to meet; come together" K'a(m) "toward, hither"
0281 gaŋ "leaf" xan "leaf"
0282 gaap' "cloud" ipá: "cloud; rain"
0285 gir "to sit" i:KeL "to sit"
0288 guš "ointment" *QâsV "smooth" (slippery feeling?)
0290 ga' "to be sick" AX "(to be) sick"
0290 ga' "to be sick" *aq'ü "to cough; to clear throat"
0291 gu' "to become wet; wash" K'u "to swim"
0292 gu' "to kill" K'u "to kill"
0293 gwâa "to cut, cut through" kw'a "to scratch"
0293 gwâa "to cut, cut through" qxaw "cut"

43
0294 gwab "to not do; desist; stop" kyhu(wa) "negative"
0295 gwad "to cut, circumcise" *xwat'V "blood"
0303 gwar "to tear off" *kwalú "to peel bark; hide, leather"
0304 gwaats "eagle" awiča "golden eagle"
0305 gwîts "small' Ku'Su "narrow"
0306 gwa' "bite" qa "bite, by biting"
0315 kah "to not be" xu "negative" (not be>not)
0316 kal "bring home" ky'a "carry"
0317 kul "all" *qUlV "full" (semantics: 'all full')
0317 kul "all" kyu "all"
0318 kol "upper chest, nape of neck" q'o(y) "neck; throat; to swallow"
0322 kum "increase, multitude" qam "big, long, tall, far"
0328 kâr "fence" axwir "fence"
0331 kît "cold" xyač' "cold, winter"
0339 kwaats "hoe" wasu "digging stick"
0342 kwal "to pound" q'al "to rub; clean"
0343 inkwal "kidney" xuLu "kidney; round"
0344 kwâał "to go away" *xwälV "aside; to one side"
0344 kwâał "to go away" KaL(Vw) "to run"
0346 kwir "to twist" kw'iny "to twist; twirl; twine"
0346 kwir "to twist" *(Hä)kwürV "to curl; to bend"
0350 γa "tree; wood" *ähö "wood"
0359 γûl "dry" Xuly "dry"
0360 γelf "strength; arrogance" *Kúlúp' "penis; have an erection"
0360 γelf "strength; arrogance" *qhëlö "chief (of tribe)"
0365 γunts "pubic hair; beard" *qhëčhë "grey hair; quail's topknot"
0367 γâp "to rise, arise" Kap "to jump, fly"
0368 γar "night; to become dark" xUR "dark; evening"
0369 γiir "glue, paste" xawA "pitch"
0370 γaat' "back of knee" *q'otu "knee"
0372 γaa' "hill" wi "mountain; on"
0373 γâa' "to cry loudly" kya "to speak, talk"
0374 γwa "fire" iyu "fire"
0376 γwal "to hang" KiL "to hang"
0376 γwal "to take away" K'uly "lift; climb, arise"
0378 γwâap "to split (tr.)" qaP "to split; break with teeth"
0380 γwax "to walk about" aho: "to walk; run"
0381 γweex "to cry out" wač "to shout"
0382 γwây "hot" aHáw "fire; firewood"
0384 xadl "to wet down" Xá'la "damp, wet"
0386 xah "to cry out with fear" xa "to weep, cry"
0387 xâj [xâdž] "to rub" xeč' "to scrape with claws"
0388 xal "thin stalks, grass stalks" xaL "tule [a kind of bulrush]"
0389 xîł "to scratch off" xwaly "to scratch"
0390 xoł "to make a rough/raspy sound" *keHlV "to cough"
0391 xan "to go" ha "to go"
0394 xas "float, glide, bird" Xáša "arrow"
0396 xiš "small, weak" xič "girl"
0396 xiš "a little; small" *kuč' "a little bit; few; small"
0399 xw- "female" qe "woman"
0399 xwat "female" xyaC' "girl"
0400 xwaal "to draw out" *qåla "long" (c.f. Eng. 'drawn out')
0401 x"'an "nose" xu "nose"‡
0403 xwar "enemy" xway "enemy"
0406 xwaat "tear, scrape, circumcise" xwá(t') "blood, red"
0408 k'âb "cold" q'iw "cold; to freeze"

44
0411 k'ats "half; to out down" qiC'i "small" (cut down>small)
0412 k'ad "to stay; stand" KaS "to stand"
0413 k'adl "to cut; split apart" kyat "to cut; break; bite"
0421 k'iŋ "to transport things" (i)kyi "to carry"
0424 k'ar "top, peak" Kur "far, distant" (peak>extremity>far)
0428 k'os "bone" *q'usV "shoulder blade"
0433 k'ey "to vomit" hay "to spit (out)"
0435 k'o'š "joint (of body)" [as in Semitic] q'usa "joint; elbow; jaw, chin"
0438 a-kw- "water" a:-xyá' "water"
0442 kwal "to shout" *khålî "to sing; to dance (in a line)"
0443 kwal "to move, shake (repetitively)" *khålî "to dance (in a line); to sing"
0445 kwalf "bark (of tree)" *qhäwählV "bark (of tree)"
0449 kwânh "egg" *ik'å "egg"‡
0450 kwâr "hunger" qxUr "to be hungry"
0451 kwaat' "to wet down; to rain" *qháčë "cold; winter"
0455 dzac "to fear" *SEjHV "to fear"
0459 dzam "cold; wet" *šwîmV "cold; frost"
0461 dzixw "salt" (i)siyV "salt"
0464 jaf [džaf] "dripping, seeping" č'iPu "fog"
0464 jaf [džal] "waterhole" *čháphë "spring, well (of water)"
0466 jek [džek] "nail, claw" *dîk'i "finger"
0470 ji [dži] "this one; anyone" (a)čhi "thing; what?"
0483 îtsan "brother" a:t'un "brother"I
0484 tsul "bad" (q)xul "bad"
0485 tsim "plant growth in general" *simb(ü) "moss; tree moss"
0487 tsur "to chatter; to sing" (U)sow "to sing; song; dance"
0489 ceec "to excrete; feces" céreq "to shit; dirt(y)"
0492 cîl "liver, belly, stomach (?)" *čwëlV "testicle"
0492 cîl "stomach" sílyi "behind, rear"
0493 car "foggy; to be wet" *cúHri "cold weather; winter"
0501 tsuun "hair" *'üšü "hair"
0512 šok "to close" š'ok "to close"
0519 šeŋ "to be good" C'um "good"
0526 šay "to sparkle; star" ša "clear, shining; star"
0529 s'êd "red" šit "blood"
0530 s'ig "to delay; to be quiet" *SejHV "to fear"
0541 s'iw "daylight, sunlight" aši "day, sun"
0543 s'â' "sun, to glow" (a)xya' "morning, daylight"
0545 s'i' "to huny, haste" SU "to run"
0556 c'ilm "black; darkness" xalVm "night, pitch dark"
0557 c'aam "to sleep" *sema "to sleep"
0568 m- "somebody" ma "person; who? what?"
0569 mâ "water" imé' "to drink"‡
0571 ma "what? who?" ma "person; who? what?"‡
0572 ma "negative" ma: "negative"
0573 mâc "sway; drunk; totter" mat "poison; sorcery"
0573 mâc "sway; drunk; totter" me "to fall"
0574 maac "flow over" mati "to fill"
0579 moodz "soil" *ómat' "earth, dust, ashes"
0584 maj [madž] "bring" ma "bring"
0584 maj [madž] "to come forth; to stick out" *majH "suddenly"
0589 man "to lose" *mA "to lose"
0597 mâat' "to sell; to buy" mu:T "to hand (over)"

45
0598 matl' "empty" *mAtA "thirsty"1
0598 matl' "empty" maL "bad"
0600 maawt "to die" maT "to die"
0602 môxw "to bend" moqHo "knee"
0604 ma' "coldness" mAtU "cold; to freeze"
0605 m' "to go toward" mu "to run"
0606 maa' "to eat" ama "to eat"
0607 mu' "to handle" (a)mu "to hold"
0608 nê(e) "with" (i)ma "with"
0609 ni "of (genitive)" an "toward" (cf. French à moi, "of mine")
0616 nih "to last; etemity" -ni "remote past" (semantics: long ago)
0620 nuuk' "to suck" nuk' "throat; to swallow"
0621 nam "skin" numi "rabbit" (semantics: valued for fur?)
0627 nii' "to go" (i)ni "to go"
0629 ŋoc' "to do damage; to smash" na "to hit; kill; stab"
0634 ŋał "to fasten; to tighten down" noly "to grasp; hand"
0635 ŋił "to cut" nyily "to write" (semantics: Eng. write)
0639 ŋit' "black" nyily "black"
0642 ŋa'w "python; serpent; crocodile" *ŋalé "eel"
0644 ñih "to shape (to a point)" nI "acorn bread" (semantics: kneading?)
0649 ñaw "to come; to retum; to be near" (i)na "to sit; to live; to be"
0653 ñay "to speak loudly" Ney "to say, tell"
0661 naxw "to surprise; to startle" (a)naH "to thunder"
0662 ŋêep "to stick; to join" *naphU "to stick, adhere to"
0665 'uc "to swallow" ači(č) "to suck"
0667 'îd "to lifl, put up high" iš "to take, hold, bring"
0672 'aaf "to see" aP "to look for"
0679 'al "to ascend, mount up" al "to climb"
0680 'al "jaw, chin, cheek" al "forehead"
0681 'il "to move to and fro" -iL "to go and do [+ verb]"
0682 'âam "to take; to raise" ama "to eat, drink, taste" (cf. Eng. partake)
0683 'im "to give; to place" imi "to bring"
0686 'aan "dawn" anya"a "sun; day"
0690 'anγw "to live; life" (Egyptian ankh) aHma "to be alive; to dwell; house; Earth"
0692 'ip "to gather, collect; to push" ap "to dig (for edible roots?)"
0695 'ir "mountain; to be raised; pillar" (I)wi "mountain; top; on"
0696 'or- "to burn" ArUy "hot"
0697 'ûur "hard, firm, strong; great" Ur "round" (semantics: stout? healthy fruit?)
0698 'is "old; fat" isa "elder sister"
0699 'as' "sun" iša "sun; day"
0700 'uš "to stick up; penis" uč(a) "to copulate"
0701 'at "to stop" -aT' "completive suffix"
0707 'uz "young; weak; girl; heifer" iči "sister"
0708 'a' "to jabber; to cry" á'i "to speak; to say"
0709 'aab "embers" aphey "ashes"
0711 'ib "to tarry, stay" ipa "to be there; to be alive"
0713 'uuf "to blow" (i)pxú "to blow"
0717 'aakw "fire" aHáw "fire; firewood"
0720 'al "eye" *tłåHV "eye"
0728 'é.nx"' "to listen" kweyá "to listen"
0731 'a§ "leg, foot" sey "leg, foot"
0735 'aay§ "flesh, meat; body" i:ši "flesh, meat; body"
0737 'az "bite, gnaw" uč'i "chew"

1
Alternatively, PH mAtA could be a compound from PAA ma ("water") + PH directional suffix -ta ("out;"
Kaufman 119) for a literal meaning of "out of water" or "away from water."

46
0742 héd "leai" xyaCa "grass"
0747 him "hair; strip away skin" imI "body hair, fur; skin"
0748 ham "sour, bitter" ama "yucca" (semantics: bitter-tasting)
0750 han "to build; to put, place" hay "to do, make"
0759 hotl' "thorn; to scratch" hu:si "pine needle; pine cone"
0760 hâw "to hack; ax; to beat" hoL "to throw at; to hit"
0761 h-y- "to travel; joumey" hi(Hθa) "path; road"
0763 hîz "large" iča "large"
0768 hâa "outside" -a "at"
0776 hal "associates, family" aLa "person, tribe; husband"
0778 heel "to seize, catch hold of" aL "to fetch"
0785 hup' "awl; weapon; sharp, point, tip" ip(H)u "awl; to stab; to sting"
0790 hur "to feel good, be at peace" ili "lazy"
0791 haas "voice; to chat" isi "to say"
0797 hâys' "to drink, sip" así "to drink"‡
0799 hooz "to speak" (a:)ši "to name" ~ (o)sí "to say"
0803 la "at, to" lya "locativecase (in; into)"
0804 lî "water; to be damp; rain" *îlî "to drip; to pour into (liquid)"
0805 lâa "to hit repeatedly" law "to grind (with pestle)"
0809 lib "belly; heart" (a)lyafu "navel";];
0810 lab "to bum" lyap' "hot; to burn, start a fire"
0814 lâgw "to speak; cackle" (a)LiK "to laugh"
0815 laaγ "back" LiK "back"
0834 li' "to shine" la "to shine; glitter"
0844 dlog "to be bent, curved" *luqe "neck" (semantics: bending)
0852 dlîp' "to adhere to the ground" liph "flat"
0862 âał "sun" al'a "sun"
0876 łakw' "dawn" alayi "dawn"
0880 łiŋ "mucus; to have a runny nose" iLi "snot; to blow nose; nose"
0887 ła' "weeds; grass stalk" La "leaf"
0891 ła'f "to claw, scratch" (a)laxw "claw; nails"
0892 tl'ab "to shoot" LaP "to slap; hit"
0902 tl'ok' "to beat, strike, clap" *lëKó "to beat; to rattle"
0913 tl'ow "to flow" cuw "to flow; creek; river"
0927 rub "destruction" *rürü "thunder; lightning"
0944 riiz "foot" *râlV "ankle; toe"
0951 wec "to be hard, solid" wes "horn"
0955 wadl "to flow" *wVtA "to flood"
0963 wâj [wâdž] "grass; branch; to grow" wač "madroño tree"
0964 wij [widž] "snare (trap)" wič "vulva"
0964 wij [widž] "to weave" wi(K) "to weave"
0974 wir "grow, mature, old" wir "to fmish" (grow>complete)
0984 way- "grow" (u)way "child; offspring"
0985 wiz "gall bladder; internal organ" *wusi "liver"
0991 yo "to say" ya: "to speak; tell"
1004 yâw "to produce young; child" *jawV "mouse" (semantics: small or prolific?)
1007 yâ' "to come" iyú: "to come"
1009 yu' "notice; feel cold, heat" ya: "be afraid"
1010 ya' "to die" yum "dead"
1014 hwats "blood" (a)xwát' "blood"
1015 hway "husband" awa "husband; man"
1018 widz "to accuse, scold" wač "to shout"
1019 jak [džak] "bright" č'aqx "shining"
1020 poj [podž] "to spread apart; to open" pač' "wide, broad; far"

47
F. Further Comparisons. The next list holds cognates compiled on a less rigorous ("more Greenbergian")
basis. It includes several grammatical markers. The Afroasiatic list is mostly Berber (unmarked), PAA or
Proto-Berber reconstructions (starred), and (Proto-)Chadic forms, marked with dagger (†). The Chadic
branch of Afroasiatic may be most closely related to Berber (Ruhlen 1991, 91); Hokan and Chadic may
retain words Berber has lost. The Hokan list holds words found in modern Hokan languages culled from a
variety of dictionaries, or PH recontructions (starred). To avoid undue semantic creep, this list contains
only exact or nearly exact matches in meaning.
Modern Berber forms are primarily from Penchoen. PAA reconstructions are mostly from Ehret
but include a few others from Ruhlen (1994:277-336). Chadic forms are mostly from Newman. Modern
Hokan forms are from a variety of dictionaries and grammars. PH reconstructions are from Kaufman and
from Leshchiner and Nikolaev.
English Afroasiatic Hokan Finger tukoð *dîk'i
Above *wap' wa Fire 1'afit *1yap'
Adjective -ar *-aRa Fire fiw pwe ("to burn")
And d *itá Fire uku ("be lit") *aHáw‡
Anus *pwt viθ Fish aslem *ašwá
Arm aššër *ešálV Fish *kar(w) *kar
At y y Flower †fure: *phA‡ ("leaf")
At, to *k Ki Fly/Jump firri *paL‡ ("rise")
Back adawt hetat Fly (n) izi *ači
Bad gar *xur Fog agwu *akwhey
Beat (v) †digga *t'ík‡ Foot zux *šako
Bee †mam *mum‡ ("fly") Foot/Leg *kal(w) *qálå
Belly adis atosk Forest †deli *t'a(L)‡ ("leaf")
Below ddaw *jåmwV Freeze zemmeθ simis
Brother †mal *wala‡ ("wife's Fur/Eyebrow timmi *čhemi
~") Give iš *is
Bird ašdid ačviv Good *t'wb *C'um
Bite 'čič čikyo Good izil *yisi
Body †zi *iši Good γudu xot
Bone ixs isak Grass †gwëzën *qhatsi(r)
Brains kel(ke1) *q'ula‡ Hair †suma *čemi
Breathe unfes *upis Hand afus *upu
By/Near/To †gaba *K'a(m)‡ Head †gol *xelye(T)1
Cat muš *pušV Head †ka *xwa
Causative *s- *s- Head ixf axvah
Child arba aramah Head *gam *yam ("nose")
Cloud agwi akwi Head aqërru *qharîme
Come †bei *ifi‡ Heavy †dol *Chil‡ ("big")
Cut bbéy vu Hit †hlëpë *lap
Day ass *asi‡ House †ven *aiwá‡
Die mmëθ *mat‡ Kill nax nak
Dig γëz *wašu ("hoe") Knee fud *patsa
Dirtflllud †tab *tap Know †bilin *pela
Dog *k(j)n *qhuwan Laugh uts uts-ay
Dog iyði *čhi Leaf ifër *(h)ipha
Drink sëw *isi Leg *tak tek
Dry qqar *ky'ar Leg aðar *thala
Ear amëzγu *amalyku Like, as †aka *K'a‡ ("near")
Ear asim *isamᇠLocative *-n *-an
Eye itt *at'u‡ Louse xxuy *iK'ey
Eye *'al lá'u Love/Desire *man 'imnih
Fat atun atay Man aryaz *ara
Father bba *pa Many gid-i kat-xo
Female *-t *-θa Meat qsum *šwema

48
Moon yur *q'ara Sharp šwu *šuP
Mother mma 'ma Shoulder (a)γil *pxaL‡
Mother †ajo -ja ("aunt") Skin agwil-im awul
Mouth imi yam Sleep †wisan *isimajj
Mouth aqmu *áhwó Small †kwúšù *ku'su
Near/With †ka *k'a Smoke aggu *axwa
Neck heñi hañak Son ul *ala‡
Neck/Cheek *buq(V') *wåp'ukhi Snake fiγér *PúSurV
Night id *(w)etu Spear †gas *Xáša ("arrow")
Obsidian †suk *čhakA ("flint") Suck sum sunyal
One iyen ehin Suck *mlg milqé ("throat")
Person iman *mano That tan *ta
Plural *-an *-n That wan *wa
Plural *-w *-wi That/This *n(j) *nya
Pull zuγer šuk This *kaa *qa
Reciprocal *m *ma This ta *ta
Red zeggwaγ čaxwat This wa *wa
Reflexive *m *ma Tooth uyel iya
Remain *mn ama Tree xlij *lyi
River asif sava Vocarive ya [Arabic] *a
Roast †surë *šily Wing afer ewir
Root azur *ači Woman mëttu *imátV‡
Salt isen *isi Woodpecker †sura čwurá
Say ini *ney ("kite")
m
Shadow malu *alVm ("night") Worm a-wkkiw buk'a
G. Sound Correspondences. The following sound correspondences suggest themselves from a cursory
examination of the data. Several of the correspondences are very good. It should be remembered that
Hokan may have arisen through pidginization or creolisation. These circumstances give rise to extensive
mishearing without subsequent opportunity for correction, Thus pidgins show more random phonological
irregularity than languages transmitted 'normally.' We should also remember that our knowledge of Hokan
languages is "miserable" (Leshchiner and Nikolaev, 366) and thus our PH reconstructions are mere
approximations. Thus it may be impossible at present to establish "regular" sound correspondences where
the PH side of the equation is simply conjecture in some phonetic detail. (This may especially be the case
with velar consonants, which do not seem to correspond regularly from PAA to PH.) Correspondences are
given as Afroasiatic : Hokan. The character ø should be read "zero."
a : i/u (a and i alternated in PAA; see Ehret, 51) n/r : r/n (0230, 0346, GRASS)
b : p (0002, 0004, 0009, 0011, 0022, 0028, 0029, p : p (0042, 0043, 0052, 0053, 0057, 0059, etc.)
0032, 0038, etc.) p' : p (0104, 0105, 0106, 0110, 0117)
d : t(') (0125, 0132, 0138) t' : š/č (0240, 0246, 0249, 0261, etc.; this seems
f : p (0094, HAND, BREATHE) like a very strong correspondence)
f : f (0067, 0080) -us : -s (FIVE, HAND)
f : ph (0065, 0066, 0088, LEAF, FLOWER) VC : CV (syllable form)
h : ø (0747, 0791, 0797, 0799) x : x (0384, 0386, 0387, 0388, 0389, 0394)
j : č (0387, 0464, 0470) xw : xw (0403, 0406)
l/w : w/l (0642, 0720, 0760, FISH) z : l (0944, EAR)
-m/-n : -ø (0222, 0391, 0401, 0449, FAT, z : č/š (0181, 0189, 0191, 0196, 0199, 0204,
HOUSE, KNOW, SALT, THAT, etc.) 0206, 0208, BODY, FOOT, PULL, RED,
m : m (0568, 0569, 0571, 0573, 0574, 0584, ROOT, etc.)
0597, etc.) ' : ø (0672, 0709, 0713, 0717, 0720, 0731, 0735,
0737, etc.)
H. Observations. The match between Hokan and Afroasiatic is robust; perhaps more so than that
connecting one branch of Hokan to another. When Greenberg (1963) published Languages of Africa, he
illustrated Afroasiatic membership by using 78 cognate words. In Greenberg's list Chadic shares in 76 of
the items (97%), Cushitic in 51 (65%), Semitic in 38 (49%), Egyptian in 36 (46%) and Berber in 31 (40%).
Solely on the basis of my own preliminary study, reconstructed Proto-Hokan shares in fully 34 (43%) of

1
those items (marked above with ‡). Nobody doubts the Afroasiatic nature of Egyptian or Berber, whose
percentage of cognates is roughly equivalent to Hokan. The hypothesis of an Afroasiatic-Hokan connection
is actually strengthened by the geography: Not one of the resemblances can be due to borrowing unless the
hypothesis is correct and there were (are) Afroasiatic speakers in the Americas.
I. Hypothesis. Speakers of an Afroasiatic language (Berber) appear to have created the pre-Indo-European
Megalithic and Bell-Beaker cultures of prehistoric Western Europe and North Africa (Adams 1975, 235ff).
Contemporary trans-Atlantic contact between this culture realm and the Caribbean mainland area has been
asserted in the form of pottery forms and other traits (Kennedy 1971, 266ff). Attention is drawn to the role
of Neolithic Berbers in the diffusion of stoneworking and pottery techniques from the Beaker culture to the
New World (Kennedy 1971, 271ff). 3000 BC is a rough date for this trans-Atlantic diffusion (Kennedy
1971, 271) which is also the date proposed for the formation of the Hokan languages (Langdon, 74).
Afroasiatic-speaking Berbers could have been the vehicle for the diffusion of what Kennedy calls this "Pan-
Atlantic Culture," and a settlement of these people (whether planned or otherwise) would explain the
presence of an Afroasiatic language—known as Hokan—in the Americas.
***

Bibliography:
Abdel-Massih, Ernest T., A Computerized Lexicon of Tamazight (Ann Arbor: 1971)
Adams, G.B. (1975), "Hamito-Semitic and the Pre-Celtic Substratum in Ireland and Britain," in Bynon and
Bynon, below.
Adams, J .N. (1994), "Latin and Punic in Contact?" in Journal of Roman Studies, 1994:88-112
Alboroz, Miguel, Hernando de Soto, Knight of the Americas (NY: Franklin Watts, 1986)
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The Berber Project—Second (Revised) Edition

by R. Ben Madison
© 1997 R. Ben Madison; All Rights Reserved—Toct i Drepts Reservats
This copy was printed on 8 May 1997 and supersedes all previous printings.
Prepared for internet distribution by S:reu Iustì Canun, UrGP, 2013.

For more information about Talossa, consult our World Wide Web site at:

http://www.execpc.com/~talossa
http://www.kingdomoftalossa.net/
55
Proof of Berber-Moundbuilder Identity:

The Astounding Proof:

1a (Indian Mound, Wisconsin, showing man with outstretched arms

and two horns, or feathers, on his head; Radin 1923:49) and lb
(Saharan Berber Petroglyph, showing man with outstretched arms and
two horns, or feathers, on his head; Sahara 1978:277). These two
images are virtually identical! Obviously, Berbers were
responsible for both of them! Note as well, the African Berber
picture: The man is obviously holding a stalk of corn! How could
American corn get to North Africa unless there was profound
contact between both areas? Astonishing!

2 (Viking Map, Riley 1971:250). The Vikings believed that

Vinland—America—was was simply a peninsula connected to
Berber North Africa! The Vikings weren't stupid; they concluded
rationally on the basis of profound and amazing similarities that
the North Americans they met, and the Berbers of North Africa,
were obviously identical!

3a (Great Lakes Indian bag, On The Border 1990:8) and 3b (Berber

mat, D'Ucel 1932, plate 14). Separated by thousands of miles, the
purity of Berber culture remains! Note the diamond and chevron
patterns identical to both the Indian and Berber textiles!

56