Taino ritual seat

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The history of humanity as told through one hundred objects from the British Museum. This week the Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, is exploring high status objects from across the world around 700 years ago. Today he tells the story of a beautifully carved ritual seat - an object which has survived the destruction of the Caribbean culture that produced. This four legged wooden stool, or duho, with its long shape and wide-eyed face probably belonged to a chief, or "cacique" of the Taino people of the Caribbean. Taino was a term used to describe a spectrum of peoples who originated in South America and who populated the whole region, including Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. Neil tells the story of the Taino speaking people and their demise following the arrival of Europeans. The archaeologist Jose Oliver looks at how the Taino spread around the Caribbean while the Puerto Rican scholar Gabriel Haslip-Vieira explains their impact on the region today. Producer: Anthony Denselow

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.
0:10.0	This week we've been talking about high status objects that belong to leaders and
0:18.0	thinkers around the world about 700 years ago.
0:21.0	Objects that reflect the societies that produced them in
0:24.3	Scandinavia and Nigeria, Spain and China. Today's object is a stool from the
0:29.7	Caribbean from what is now the Dominican Republic and it too tells a rich story in this case
0:35.8	of the Taino people who lived in the Caribbean islands before the arrival of
0:39.9	Christopher Columbus.
0:47.0	In the history of the world that we've been telling, this stool is the first object
0:56.3	in which the separate narratives of the Americas on the one hand and Europe Asia and Africa
1:00.9	on the other intersect, or perhaps more accurately collide.
1:05.0	But this is no ordinary domestic thing, it's a stool of great power.
1:12.0	A strange and exotic ceremony It's a stool of great power.
1:13.0	A strange and exotic ceremonial seat carved into the shape of an otherworldly being, half human, half animal,
1:20.0	which would take its owners travelling between worlds and gave them the power of prophecy.
1:26.0	We don't know if the seat helped them foretell it, but we do know that the people who made this seat
1:31.2	had a terrible future ahead of them.
1:34.0	It hides a lot more information that you might suspect and it's eliciting that information
1:39.0	that really is thrilling for me.
1:42.0	These objects, for those of us who grew up here in New York,
1:45.0	were almost like objects of veneration
1:47.0	in the sense that we were rediscovering
	...

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