When Christopher Columbus set foot on San Salvador in AD 1492, he was not even the first European to explore the ‘New’ World; Norse warriors had reached North America long before him. And, of course, the Americas had been inhabited by humans since the last Ice Age. When Columbus arrived, he met the Lucayan group of the Taíno people, who had been occupying the major Caribbean islands since they set out in canoes from South America some 2,500 years ago. They encountered the palaeolithic hunter-gatherers of the islands, replacing them on the islands by means of warfare, the spread of disease, and aggressive cultural colonisation. Dominating the islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, the Taíno forgot their warlike ways, so that when Columbus arrived, he praised the natives for their placid demeanour. Taíno society was complex: the villages (yucayeques) were arranged into confederations (cacicazgo) headed by a chief called a cacique, below whom were two classes. The nitaínos were a noble class of landowners, while the naborías were an underclass of labourers. Men engaged primarily in hunting, with poison-tipped arrows, while the women cultivated a number of edible plants around the village edge.

Taíno religion was based on the worship of ancestral spirits, known as zemí. This name was also given to the sculptural objects in which they were claimed to reside. Zemí sculptures were kept in the bohios, round huts which acted as temples, but were also dedicated in caves and private homes, to commemorate their own ancestors. Zemís were most usually carved from wood, but were known in a variety of materials, including stone, bone, and even drawings on cotton. Thanks to the humid Caribbean climate, it is mostly the stone examples that survive. They depict the spirit in an unusual skeletal form. Most obviously, this is a reference to the link between the living and the dead. Originally, the Taíno kept the actual skulls of their ancestors, sometimes at home and sometimes at the bohios. But the same climate that ensured wood and cotton zemís failed to survive also damaged the skulls, and the Taíno began to look for more permanent replacements. But while the skeletal imagery is obvious, there is also a more subtle reference in these images. During Taíno religious ceremonies, participants crushed the seeds of the cojóbana tree, laid the resulting powder on the top of a zemí figure, and snorted it. The drug, cohoba, brought on intense hallucinations, and could affect the user for multiple days. Having not eaten or drunk, the user would become emaciated looking. This was reflected in the physique of the zemí itself, and it is likely that the contorted poses of zemís also represented the peculiar body positioning of the user.

This particular zemí sculpture represents a figure crouching, with his hands and feet brought together. His general proportions are skeletal – his face is reminiscent of a skull, with hollow eyes and nose, and all flesh seemingly absent. The skeletal aspect is reinforced by a dramatic rendition of the scapulae and backbone. The figure wears armbands at the pits and wrists, and a decorated band over the head. The figure is in an approximately triangular shape, which recalls the trigolonitos, the three-cornered stones which form one of the most important testimonies of the ritual practices of the Taíno world. They were probably made to represent the mountains of the islands, and were used for rituals connected to fertility and securing good harvests of cassava. The closeness to the trigonolito type allows to propose a potential interpretation of this zemí as connected to fertility and harvest rituals.