Pure and simple animal attraction

UNKNOWN AMAZON __ British Museum

THE adjective "delightful" doesn't usually spring to mind when we think of the art of pre-conquest Latin America. "Stunning but terrifying" is more like it, particularly if you have visited the British Museum's Mexican Galleries, with their spectacular array of Mayan sculptures that depict bloodletting ceremonies and Aztec implements used in human sacrifice - above all, a gorgeous jade knife that cut out the still-beating heart of victims.

Unknown Amazon, a groundbreaking exhibition of the art and culture of the Amazon rainforest, which features many recent archaeological discoveries, is much less bloodcurdling. The ancient Amazonians were far from being pacifists - there are some decorated trophy skulls of enemies, and paddle-shaped clubs for bashing heads - but here we get the impression they were more concerned with hunting, feasting, lovemaking and getting high.

Fertility is celebrated in some wonderfully ebullient clay figurines of females.

There is a squat, blatantly phallic one, with clenched facial features, who looks ready to explode; another who holds her foot to her mouth with such ceremony it might almost be a wind instrument; and a pregnant woman whose inflated head and moony eyes suggest that pregnancy is indeed a state of mind as well as body. Even the male figures look pregnant: some funeral urns of seated figures are a cross between barrels and sumo wrestlers. The pneumatic quality of these clay figures may be a response to living in an environment dominated by water. These hieratic, hollow, pumped-up bodies give the impression they would always float with their heads above water.

Many of the geometrical patterns painted on, and woven into, the artifacts are based on animal markings. The Amazonians believed they came closest to the animal kingdom when they took hallucinatory drugs, which intensified their vision. A stone mortar for grinding hallucinogenic snuff has been carved in the shape of a sharp-eyed jaguar who lays his paws on the head of a crouching human figure, pointing his eyes in the right direction.

But it's a two-way exchange, as the jaguar is humanised: it squats on hind legs, presiding like a strict childminder.

Altogether, a real eye-opener.

_ Until 1 April. Information: 020 7636 1555.

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