26 INTRODUCTION
Figure A.11 Painting of
the defender of the Indians,
Fray Bartolomé de Las
Casas. James A. Magner,
Men of Mexico,2nd ed.
Salem, NH: Books for
Libraries, Ayer Company
Publishers, 1968.Scientific Precursors
Not all the early writers on the Mesoamerican Indians were Romanticists. For ex-
ample, the famous sixteenth-century Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas
(1958:105:69–72), rejected the Romantic notion that the Indians were descended
from the Lost Tribes of Israel on the grounds that the languages and cultures of
Mesoamerica were unlike those of the ancient Hebrews. He argued instead that the
New World was an extension of the posterior part of Oriental India and that the In-
dians were thus “natural” to the American continent (Figure A.11). Another Span-
ish priest, the Jesuit José de Acosta (A.D. 1540–1600), also denied any connection
between the American Indians and biblical peoples. Like Las Casas, Acosta (1987)
concluded on rational grounds that the New World must have been connected to the