The Faces of America

What the archeologists don't know about pre-Spanish America dims about 20 centuries of history. Much of what they do know has been dug up with scraps of Mayan, Toltec and Aztec sculpture. Last week a few of the existing clues to the Western Hemisphere's rich, mysterious cultural past were on display in Mexico City.

The Sociedad de Arte Moderno had lovingly collected 330 examples of native Mexican sculpture, mounted them in a dazzling exhibit. The show was loosely called Mascaras Mexicanas (Mexican Masks) -- but along with the religious, ceremonial and dance masks was a colorful assortment of sculptured heads originally designed as decorations for jewelry, pot tery, architecture.

Since Mexico for centuries was a cultural crossroads between two continents, its art is actually the native art of Amer ica. To eyes accustomed to European art (notably the 39 U.S. delegates who ar rived in Mexico City last week for the Inter-American Conference), it is some times shocking -- sometimes repulsive.

Some exhibit highlights from the work of a few of the 165-odd Indian tribes who had a fairly complex civilization when Cortes came to disturb them in 1519:

P: A white stucco modeled head (see cut) from the Mayas, a gentle, highly cultured people. Imaginative historians credit the Mayas and their ancestors with developing maize from wild grasses, sacrificing their prettiest maidens to the rain god, and rescuing a few light-skinned survivors when the lost continent of Atlantis sank into the sea.

P: A stylized white stone head of Tlaloc, a rain god from the Mixteca-Puebla tribes, famed for their delicate gold jewelry and carvings on bone and wood.

Bringing its exhibit up to the 20th Century, the Sociedad also showed a modern Indian dance mask fashioned of straw, bits of mirror ?nd shiny human teeth (see cut). But in the main, there was not much effort to place works in their exact historical niches. Even the archeologists avoid references to epochs: they merely speak of four vague "cultural horizons."

Most fascinating historical problem of all was restated and left unanswered by Mexico City's sculpture show: where did the original inhabitants of the Americas come from? Some experts believe that the Toltecs and the Aztecs drifted to the central plains of Mexico from Asia, by way of Alaska. The tantalizing, inconclusive "evidence" that keeps cropping up in early Mexican art: what looks like Chinese jade, Oriental symbols, the swastika and a few Grecian motifs which filtered into China from Greece hundreds of years before Christ.

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