Fell writes that Libyans and Egyptians traveled up the great rivers to Iowa and the Dakotas; he says the ancient burial mounds found in many parts of the Midwest and the East are actually the work of the same ancient voyagers. A clay tablet found in a mound in Iowa carries identical messages in three languages: Egyptian, Punic, and Libyan, Fell claims. The publicists for America B.C. like to compare Fell's translation of this tablet to Champollion's 19th century translation of the Rosetta Stone, which enabled archeologists to read Egyptian hieroglyphics.

According to Fell the Pima Indians of the Southwest speak a Semitic tongue acquired from Iberian Punic colonists who came 2500 years ago, and the Zunis of Arizona speak a language derived directly from Libyan, with a vocabulary composed of elements from Coptic, Middle Egyptian, and Nubian.

One's first reaction to all these amazing claims is to wonder how, if Fell's theories are correct, the entire American archeological profession could have missed the boat. How can a marine biologist know so much more than archeologists and anthropologists who have devoted their lives to the study of American Indian cultures?

Fell says it is because his work is based on linguistic evidence, and particularly on the decoding of ancient inscriptions--a discipline known as epigraphy. He says that because Americans speak a dominant world language, both comparative linguistics and epigraphy have been slighted here, and authentic ancient inscriptions are variously dismissed as the meaningless marks of savages, the result of plows scraping against stones, or tree roots pressing against rocks. Fell describes the prevailing attitude as "If you find it in America, it can't be writing."

But leaving aside for now the question of Fell's claim to a unique competence in linguistics, there are other aspects of America B.C. that raise doubts. To the layman, Fell's theories seem well-constructed and scholarly at first. But after a while a certain pattern develops. Time after time the internal consistency of his argument depends upon the acceptance of ad hoc hypotheses that strain the limits of credibility.

For example, Fell advances one particularly convoluted hypothesis that links Iberian Celts with Ogam writers in Ireland and Celtic kingdoms in New England. Part of Fell's argument depends upon linking megalithic structures in both Europe and America with the ancient Celts. But Fell notes that Celtic Ogam writing is found only on stone buildings in America, and not in Europe. The reason, he says, is that the early Christian missionaries obliterated all traces of the pagan writing from hundreds of similar megalithic structures in Europe.

In another instance, Fell says that although the ancient Phoenicians claimed that their raw materials came from Gaul, they really got them from North America, for which they used Gaul as a code name to deceive their commercial rivals.

In another place he argues that Basque sailors left their names on gravestones. However, New England farmers dragged all those alleged gravestones away from their original sites, thus explaining why no bones or other artifacts have ever been found with them.

Fell argues elsewhere that Phoenician voyagers populated their American colonies with Iberian workers whose "rude manner of life" accounts for the lack of sophisticated material objects at the sites he says they occupied. Nevertheless, these hypothesized, uncultured people supposedly learned to read and write the Phoenician language. Fell says the inscriptions they left prove this.

These last examples bring up a very major objection to Barry Fell's theories. With so many mini-kingdoms all over the North American continent, with all those traders bustling about, and even mining settlements in many places, why is there no hard archeological evidence other than Fell's alleged inscriptions?

Archeologists came to accept that Vikings traveled to North America only after material evidence--artifacts such as tools and pottery--and settlement ruins were found in Nova Scotia. But Fell's book includes no hard archeological evidence that has not either been declared a fraud by professional archeologists, established as something other than what Fell says it is, or been considered in the context of a more plausible hypothesis than the one Fell constructs.

Several of Fell's decipherments are based on inscriptions that professional archeologists say are frauds. The most interesting is a tablet found by one Reverend Jacob Gass in an Indian burial mound in Davenport, Iowa in 1877. (Among other errors in Fell's discussion of the tablet, he says it was found in 1874.)

The Davenport tablet, which is one of the tablets discovered in the mound, is none other than the breakthrough Readers' Digest compared to the Rosetta Stone.

Effigy pipes in the form of elephants were found in other mounds nearby. Fell claims these are proof of contact with North African civilizations in ancient times.

The Davenport finds were immediately claimed by some to be frauds, and for several years a debate raged among archeologists all over the world. Science magazine carried letters both supporting and rejecting the authenticity of the tablets and the effigy pipes. Ultimately, investigations by officials of the Smithsonian Institution conclusively established that the tablets, and many other supposed artifacts, were frauds planted alongside authentic American Indian artifacts and skeletons of the Hopewell people.