The Taíno origin myth claims that they were born of the Earth in time immemorial, having emerged from a womb-like cave known as Cacibajagua, in what is now the Dominican Republic. In reality, the Taíno were immigrants to the Caribbean, probably originating among the Arawak-speaking peoples of the Amazon basin, and emerging in three waves of migration. They displaced the native hunter-gatherer peoples through warfare, disease, and cultural assimilation, and soon became one of the two dominant forces in the Caribbean, alongside the Caribs. Their complex society consisted of confederations of villages (yucayeques), with each confederation headed by a cacique (chief). The chief was supported in his duties by the priests (bohíques) and noblemen (nitaínos), who between them owned all the land. The main function of the nitaínos was to supervise the lowest social class, the naborias, whose women worked the land and whose men hunted for food and processed the yucca, the Taínos’ primary food source. Feared warriors, they lost their martial reputation over the centuries; on the islands of the Caribbean, the Taíno were generally insulated from the outside world, with the exception of the Caribs with whom they occasionally tussled. Disputes between the Taíno confederations were instead settled through the ball-game, batey, which they probably brought from South and Central America with them. As a result, when a stranger arrived in AD 1492 on the island of San Salvador, they welcomed him as an equal despite the strangeness of his skin and unintelligible language. He was Christopher Columbus, and within a century of his arrival, the Taíno culture was extinct in the Caribbean.

The Taíno religion consisted of the worship of spirits, some of which are erroneously labelled ‘gods’ by the Europeans who studied them. They were broadly divided into two types, the zemís, who were ancestral spirits, and the opia, the spirits of the jungle. Religious practice consisted of communing with these spirits, through ceremonies mediated by the bohiques. During such ceremonies, the berries of the cojobána tree (Anadenanthera spp.) were dried and ground into a hallucinogenic snuff, known to the Spanish as cohoba, and was snorted by the participants. The resulting psychogenic trip could last four or five days, during which worshippers did not eat or drink, leaving them emaciated. As a result, their image became more skeletal, more akin to the ancestors who had passed before them, and their reported experiences were taken to be communication with the spirit world. Strongly associated with these experiences was a figure known to anthropologists as the ‘Taíno Bird-Man’. This figure came to Western attention when, in AD 1799, three wooden Bird-Men appeared at the Society of Antiquaries in London. Their role is unknown; most commonly it is presumed that they represent shamans wearing bird costumes, though there is no evidence for such a practice among the writings of Ramón Pané, the only contemporary European witness of the Taíno. Instead, it is probable that the Bird-Man was some kind of hybrid spirit, somewhere between zemí and opia.

This extraordinary ceremonial celt depicts the Bird-Man motif in its full glory. A charming bird’s head stares directly out at the viewer, with bulging eyes – in contrast to the usually vacant skeletal stare of most Taíno zemí sculptures – and a sharp beak with flaring nostrils. His wings are angled to the side, giving the impression of hunched shoulders, and from them sprout two human arms with hands held in front of him in a pose known from humanoid zemí sculptures. Around the Bird-Man are various ritual patterns, which probably reference tattoos worn by the Taíno. The shape of the celt is unusual, but not unknown; a similar form can be found in the Taíno Museum in Haiti. The purpose of such celts is debated. Certainly, some were the insignia of the cacique, attached to a stave to become a ceremonial hatchet (manyana). Others, however, appear to have been dedicated in caves and other sacred sites on the islands, especially Cuba, and it has been suggested therefore that an ‘axe cult’ similar to that noted from Veracruz in the pre-Olmec Period, might have prevailed.