When Columbus arrived in AD 1492 on what he called San Salvador (native Guanahani), now part of the Bahamas, the island had already been inhabited for millennia. The people we call the Taíno were themselves colonisers, however. Originating probably in the Amazon Basin, the Taíno set out on wooden canoes to the islands of the Caribbean. There, they met the hunter-gatherer peoples who had populated those islands since the last Ice Age. Through a mixture of war, cultural assimilation, and the spread of disease, the Taíno – a feared warrior people – eradicated the native culture, and established a rich and thriving society of their own. Taíno society was complex and hierarchical. At the top, sat the cacique, the tribal chief. Below him were two classes; the nitaínos, noble landowners, and the naborias, who did the manual labour. Taíno women performed the main activities in the life of the community, notably agriculture, while the men were freed up for hunting, fishing and warring.

The Taíno religion centred on the worship of zemís, the spirits of the ancestors, as well as opia, the spirits of the forest. Some of the ancestral beings, zemí, rose to the status of deities, worshipped by all Taíno and not just their immediate descendants. The religious ceremonies of the Taíno were largely based around the practice of transcending the human and spirit worlds through the means of a hallucinogenic drug known as cohoba, made by crushing the dried berries of the cojobána tree (Anadenanthera spp.). Under the effects of this hallucinogen, practitioners would often not eat or drink for days, lending their bodies a skeletal appearance, which reflected the world of the ancestors that they were supposed to have visited. Their confused utterances were consider a mode of communication with the ancestors. The importance of the cohiba ceremonies of the Taíno is underlined by the amount of paraphernalia associated with the preparation and consumption of cohiba which survives. Cohiba spoons are particularly prominent, for transferring the cohiba from the vessel it was prepared in onto the surface from which it was snorted. It has even been argued that the principal ritual purpose of the zemí sculptures, the figural representations of the spirits, was to provide a surface from which snuff could be snorted.

This exceptional pestle was designed for use in this ceremony, in the important function of grinding the dried berries into a fine powder which practitioners could snort. It consists of a large disk-like base, rising through a conical body, up to a finial which consists of two birds’ heads. Around the neck of the pestle, and the bodies of the birds, are traditional Taíno patterns: zig-zags embellished with dots, and swirling patterns that mimic the waters of the Caribbean. The birds are somewhat skeletal; large empty orbits stare out at the viewer, while the nostril on the top of the beak is also especially prominent. It is hard to determine which birds are represented here. The length of the beak suggests some kind of seabird, perhaps the American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) which winters in the Caribbean. The choice of birds was not accidental. Of all the forest spirits (opia) known from Taíno myth, birds were considered the most potent travellers between the world of the living and the spirit world. Aquatic birds of all types were especially prominent, seeing as they could traverse all three of the earthly realms – land, sea, and sky – and so the identification of these birds as seabirds would make sense given the transcendental nature of the cohoba ceremony.