A truly exceptional piece of work

We don’t know exactly where it comes from, but it almost certainly came from the island of Hispaniola, or what is today Haiti / Dominican Republic, and it is made out of a very dark dense wood which we call Guayacan. This wood, aside from having medicinal properties, is extremely durable, and this is one of the reasons why this one is preserved in a fairly good condition and possibly one of the best examples of the seats that were used by the chiefs, particularly on ceremonial occasions.

The use of the duho, or seat: you have to think of it not as a piece of furniture but rather as a symbolic location of where the seat would stand. This particular object, it is too small for actually a human being sitting on it. Therefore just the fact that you’re sitting, or crouching on top of it – already, like the thrones of the monarchies – distinguishes this individual from everybody else.

What is interesting is all the wooden seats that we know from the Caribbean, including this one, tend to be male. They are marked with the male gender, and like in this case they sometimes show the male genitalia under the seat. And that’s because this seat is actually an anthropomorphic person. Think of it as a human being on four legs and what you sit on is on the back of this personage. And that’s why the genitalia are on there, and you sit on top almost as if you were sitting on a donkey or a horse, and so on.

So the chief is mounting this object which happens to also be a sentient being. In other words they think of these things as having ‘cemi’, that is, a soul.

The main use was in a ceremony called ‘kohoba’. Kohoba is a word for a hallucinogenic drug which is still used today in South America for exactly the same purposes - in order to have a contact with these spiritual beings. And this is actually how they formulated policies because they consulted these supernatural beings – about who to marry, who to go to war with, who to make peace with, who their daughters should marry, and so on.

So the institution of government was based on this ritual and ceremonial of being able to consult the powers – the supernatural powers. And the seat is the focus that gathers the chief and these personages, which we know had names, genealogy, a whole biography behind them of actions and acts which they did with the chief. And so this is truly an exceptional piece of work.

BBC - A History of the World - Object : Taino ritual seat