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Actually, there is gold on our duho as well. The wide gaping mouth and the straining, boggling eyes of the humanoid head at the front are emphasized by being inlaid with gold discs, adding enormously to the frightening power of the object. It was gold like this that made the Spaniards believe that they might find in Hispaniola the treasure they had been hoping for. They were disappointed: gold in the Dominican Republic is found only in the rivers, in small quantities accumulated over many generations. Like the special wood, this rare, precious gold marked out the duho as an exceptional object, something able to mediate between the earthly and the supernatural worlds.

It could also mediate between living leaders. Important visitors would be ceremonially seated on duhos, and Christopher Columbus himself received this honour. But of all the futures that could have been foretold by the Taino chiefs sitting on their duhos, nothing could have matched what actually happened. The Spaniards brought with them smallpox and typhoid – and even the common cold was catastrophic to the Taino communities, who had no immunity. Those who survived were resettled by the Spanish, so kinship groups were torn apart, and then African slaves were brought in to replace the vanishing local labour force.

How much of the Taino inheritance, or identity, survived? In the Caribbean today this is the subject of much contentious public debate. Professor Gabriel Haslip-Viera, author of Taino Revival, considers the claims of those who say they are of Taino descent:

The Taino people as a pure ethnic group essentially came to an end by 1600, about a hundred years after the arrival of the Spaniards. The small number of survivors essentially mixed in with the Spanish colonists and the Africans that were brought into the Caribbean to replace them as the main labour force. Because primarily the mixture in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is an African/European mix, that’s what has been coming out in the recent studies, the so-called admixture tests that geneticists have been doing in recent years. Those tests have demonstrated overwhelmingly that the peoples of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, of the Greater Antilles, are people of mixed background and that the mixture is primarily European and African.

The Taino may have been virtually wiped out hundreds of years ago, but we still have echoes of the lost Taino world in a few words familiar to us, words which reflect Taino experience and culture: hurricane, barbecue, hammock, canoe and tobacco. These are, in the Caribbean context, everyday things, but the physical survivals of the Taino world, like the duho stool, speak of the universal human need to connect with what is beyond the local, with the world of spirits and gods. This constant human need provides the unifying theme for my next choice of objects.

PART FOURTEEN

Meeting the Gods

AD 1200–1500

Across the world different religious systems used objects to bridge the gap between the human and the divine, to aid the dialogue between individuals, communities or even empires and their gods. In the western Christian Church, pilgrims flocked to shrines to see holy relics, including the body parts of saints. In the eastern Orthodox Christian Church, images of Jesus and the saints were venerated in the form of icons. Hindu worshippers in India used temple statues to develop personal relationships with individual Hindu gods. In Huastec Mexico, penitents visited statues of the mother goddess asking for cleansing and forgiveness. In the Pacific, the religion of the Easter Islanders evolved to reflect their deteriorating environment: they stopped venerating statues of their ancestors and instead created a cult centred on the island’s diminishing bird population.

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Holy Thorn Reliquary

Reliquary made of gold, jewels and enamel, from Paris, France

AD 1350–1400

Around 600 years ago religion and society all round the world