There was an American civilization before Columbus and Leif Ericson, as far back as 800 B.C., a Harvard professor of Invertabrate Zoology said yesterday.

Howard B. Fell, a scholar in linguistics and marine biology at the Agassiz Museum, said he bases his conclusions on the similarity of language between American Indian tribes of that period and European peoples.

"America has its own classical language with a literature, dating back 2000 years before Columbus," Fell said.

The languages of tribes in the Southwest and Northeast are closely related to Iberic, a Moorish Arabic language, Libyan, Celtic, Basque, and other languages from that area, Fell said.

Fell said he has a copy of a magnetic compass from what he believes to be about 200 B.C., indicating that Iberians and Libyans were accomplished sailors and could have reached North America at that time.

Fell says the American Indian civilization in the Southwest was overtaken between A.D. 1100 and 1200 by the "Ab" people. The word "Ab" means "Apache" in modern Pima, one of the tribes which shared the Southwestern culture called Hohokam and spoke in the near-universal tongue of North American at that time--Iberic, Fell said.

Norman Totten, chairman of the History Department at Bentley College, said yesterday that "Fell's research is basically valid. He is a genius and has deciphered more ancient scripts and languages than any other person" in the field.

Fell's hypothesis will be formally presented around October 1 in a book called "America B.C." The more technical material in his findings will be or have been printed in various scholarly publications.

Harvard archaeologists at the Peabody Museum have scoffed at Fell's theories.

But Fell said yesterday that many members of the archaeology wing of the anthropology department do not trust his findings because they do not read the journals in linguistics in which his ideas are reported and appraised.

Fell said that American Indian leaders he and his co-workers have contacted have been friendly towards his research.

One Wabanaki Indian from Maine, Fell says, has kept up a close correspondence with Fell, closing his letters in Iberic, a language the Indian has only recently learned