Magic Faces

The pre-Hispanic past left us vestiges of daily life, its splendor and its decadence, its magic-oriented thought and its scientific precision, its day-to-day worldview, and its historical greatness. Many of them are looked upon as valuable because of their complexity, size, or degree of preservation, and we have become accustomed to their importance rooted in these considerations. There are pieces, however, that have not survived in good condition—whether from natural causes or from human intervention: looting, contraband, weather, climate change—and they have come down to us incomplete, eroded, without contextual data, almost as waste to be discarded along with rubble, archaeological trash.