Thank you for downloading this episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects from BBC Radio 4.
This week we've been talking about high-status objects that belong to leaders and thinkers around the world about 700 years ago.
Objects that reflect the societies that produced them in Scandinavia and Nigeria, Spain and China.
Today's object is a stool from the Caribbean, from what is now the Dominican Republic, and it too tells a rich story.
In this case, of the Taíno people who lived in the Caribbean islands before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
In the history of the world that we've been telling, this stool is the first object
in which the separate narratives of the Americas on the one hand and Europe, Asia, and Africa on the other intersect,
or perhaps more accurately, collide.
But this is no ordinary domestic thing.
It's a stool of great power.
A strange and exotic ceremonial seat carved into the shape of an otherworldly being, half human, half animal,
which would take its owners traveling between worlds and gave them the power of prophecy.
We don't know if the seat helped them foretell it,
but we do know that the people who made this seat had a terrible future ahead of them.
It hides a lot more information than you might suspect,
and it's eliciting that information that really is thrilling for me.
These objects, for those of us who grew up here in New York, were almost like objects of veneration
in the sense that we were rediscovering our culture, culture that we didn't know existed.
A History of the World in 100 Objects.
Taíno ritual seat.