The padded envelopes arrived monthly in Miami from Peru, addressed to an art dealer in Texas. When U.S. Customs agents became suspicious and started tracking and opening the packages, they found fanciful, feathered textiles. When dogs began to sniff and signal that something else was afoot, the packages revealed more quizzical evidence: Clinging to some of the artifacts was human hair.

What to make of that?

Only one person in Miami would surely know: Art historian Carol Damian, South Florida's pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art sleuth and now the new director and chief curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, which opened Saturday at Florida International University.

''They were Inca headdresses with real hair,'' Damian says. ``That's what set the dogs off.''

Sometimes the international drama that unfolds in Damian's work as an art historian rivals the best plot lines in the television show Murder, She Wrote, and certainly, the 66-year-old Coral Gables grandmother could easily be played by Angela Lansbury. But the center of Damian's world is the university's art and art-history program and the state-of-the-art teaching museum she now leads.

She enjoys helping nab the bad guys in ''art crime,'' but put her in front of a class or in the midst of a museum exhibit, and she'll segue into the job she loves most -- sharing her vast knowledge about a significant piece of art and its place in the history of art and culture.

''If you let me go on I'm going to give you an art history lecture,'' Damian warns during a recent media tour of the new Frost.

She's standing in a gallery where the debut exhibit, Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is almost installed. In a matter of minutes, Damian strings together highlights from the show's centerpieces, and her audience is enthralled.

She talks about how Hans Hofmann, the ''father figure'' of Abstract Expressionists in New York, brought his ideas with him from Europe and influenced other painters and about how The Athlete's Dream, Larry Rivers' painting from 1956, depicts four images of a strange triangle -- Rivers, his poet lover Frank O'Hara, and his beloved mother-in-law Berdie.

Damian's story parallels South Florida's recent history, a biography significantly impacted by the role Latin Americans have played in the development of its art scene.

Born in Connecticut, Damian attended Catholic schools and majored in art history at Wheaton College in Massachussetts (her doctor father loved to paint, and a piece by him of a Florence bridge scene hangs in her dining room). She married her college sweetheart, Harvard Law School graduate Vincent Damian, and they moved to Miami, where he had family, in the late 1960s.

''It was just culture shock for me,'' Damian says. ``I didn't know anything important happened south of Washington, D.C.''

The Damians settled into an old Spanish-style house in front of Granada Golf Course -- the 11th house built in the city, which they have restored and renovated, preserving architectural details that match its historical designation.

'My mother said, `You guys can't buy a bottle of milk, and you buy this house!' She called it an elephant,'' Damian says. ``We have been fixing it for 40 years.''

GOOD NEIGHBORS

But the location would prove to be a major factor in determining the course of her professional life. She lived next door to diplomats from Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil.

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