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Lot 56
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Taino Bone Cohoba Spatula with Bicephalic Avian Finial
Taino Bone Cohoba Spatula with Bicephalic Avian Finial
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Pre-Columbian, Greater Antilles (Hispaniola or Puerto Rico), Taino, ca. 1000–1500 CE. A diminutive ritual implement carved from dense bone, likely a manatee rib, its blade tapering to a leaf-shaped tongue and terminating at the opposite end in a paired, twin-headed avian finial. The two beaked heads emerge in profile from a shared neck, their crests and curved bills rendered with economical incisions that still convey the alert posture of perched birds. Centuries of handling and burial have softened the surface to a warm ochre, mottled with earthen deposits and the fine porosity characteristic of marine mammal bone.

Objects of this type belonged to the apparatus of the cohoba ceremony, the central visionary rite of Taino religious life. Before inhaling the powdered seeds of Anadenanthera through a forked tube, the participant, often a cacique or behique, induced ritual purging by introducing such a spatula into the throat. The act cleansed the body and prepared it to receive the cemi, the ancestral and divine presences whose voices spoke through the trance. Vomiting was not incidental but liturgical, a threshold crossing that emptied the celebrant of mundane substance.

The bicephalic bird finial belongs to a broader Taino vocabulary of paired and doubled creatures, in which mirrored heads signal beings that move between worlds. Birds in particular served as psychopomps, carrying the soul of the shaman upward through the layered cosmos and returning with knowledge from the realm of the dead. That such potent iconography was lavished on an implement designed to be swallowed speaks to the seriousness with which the Taino approached the body as a vessel of transformation. At 3.4 inches, the present example sits at the modest end of the recorded size range, perhaps fashioned for a younger initiate or for personal rather than communal use. Size: 3.4" L x 0.9" W (8.6 cm L x 2.3 cm W).

Provenance: ex-private collection, Fairhaven, Massachusetts, USA, collected from 2010 to 2015

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Item # 198562

  • Condition: Good. Natural pitting and ossification to bone as well as softening of detail. Otherwise, intact with good remaining form and rich patina to surface. Old collection label on one side.

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by Artemis Fine Arts
June 25, 2026 9:00 AM MDT
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