The Taino were organized into multiple polities, each governed by a leader known as a cacique, and each showcasing its wealth and strength through carved stones, wooden and woven furniture and luxuries obtained through trade with societies from Mexico to Venezuela. (Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish colonist, reported in 1542 that among the Taino on Hispaniola there were “five very large principal kingdoms and five very powerful kings, whom almost all the other lords, who were numerous, obeyed.”)

One portable wooden throne here, dating to the early 15th century and produced by a Taino artisan in what’s now the Turks and Caicos, swoops as gently as a hammock (a word borrowed from the Taino “hamaka”), while the seat features a zoomorphic figurehead with bared teeth.

You’ll also see finely hewed three-pointed stones, from the area that is present-day Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, that are carved with the faces of humans and animals. While they appear to have some connection to yuca and cassava production, they were probably meant for spiritual rather than practical use.

Central to Taino metaphysics was “zemi,” a spiritual power that circulated from gods and ancestors into the natural environment: the sea, the forest, the stones. A Taino leader would have perceived the presence of a zemi in the tree that was carved into this show’s most exquisite object: a ritual vessel in the form of a crouching, grimacing deity, standing a little over two feet tall and meant to hold a hallucinogenic powder known as cohoba. His ears have been elongated with plugs, while on his head he wears a woven skullcap of an intricate geometric design. Look closely and you’ll see that the artist (or artists) who carved this zemi took care to groove its face with two wide, vertical ridges that extend down from his eyes to his chin. This god is crying his eyes out.