Linguistic and archaeological evidence for Berber prehistory

Résumé 0

The Berber languages are relatively well-studied, and it is possible to explore their geographical extent today and in the past, and also reconstruct basic and cultural vocabulary which can be attributed to speakers of proto-Berber. However, there is a major problem reconciling this with textual and archaeological evidence. The proto-Berber we can reconstruct seems to be far too recent to match what we know from other evidence; indeed it seems to reach back to period as late as AD 200. Textual evidence (and Canarian inscriptions) point to a period prior to 400 BC, while the most credible archaeological correlate would be the spread of pastoralism across the Sahara, pointing to the period 5-4000 BP. The paper explores this disjunction and suggests the explanation must lie in massive language leveling in the period from AD 0. In other words, the original speakers of Berber did indeed spread out westwards from the Nile Valley, 5-4000 years ago, but the diversity which evolved in this period was eliminated by sociolinguistic processes which leveled divergent speech forms. Historical linguists have been wary of invoking such processes until recently, but evidence is mounting for their importance in many and varied cultures, including Madagascar. Hypotheses are evaluated to explain the Berber situation and it is suggested that a combination of the introduction of the camel and the establishment of the Roman limes were the key factors in creating this linguistic bottleneck.