The Dwarfs Of Mount Atlas

Robert Grant Haliburton spent his last years proposing the existence of a distinctive tribal group of small stature within the Atlas Mountains and vicinity. He collected local stories and eyewitness accounts of this "dwarf people," debated critics, and published theories. These curious tales disappeared (or at least were never investigated fully) after Haliburton died, but he left an anthropological legacy that serves as a cautionary tale (or perhaps a starting point for future investigation).

This little booklet is a combination of spiritual and anthropological lore, consisting of dozens of individual accounts of the existence of a sort of tribe of extremely short, unique people in the mountains of Morocco. While these tales may have been fancy, the possibility of a dislocated splinter group of pygmies in the region does technically exist.The spiritual backdrop of dwarf worship that therefore exists, either as the result of fanciful folklore or literal reality, is of considerable interest and represents a potentially unique anthropological facet that existed (at least potentially) in part because of colonialism and Westernization.