纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 065泰诺仪式用椅（4）（在线收听）

This is a seat for a leader, for the chief of a village or a region. Taino leaders were both male and female, and the duho embodied their social, political and religious power, and it was crucial to the functioning of their society. We know that in at least one instance a leader was buried sitting on his duho. Here's Jos? Oliver, an archaeologist who's been doing new work on the Taino, and has studied how duhos would have been used:

"The use of the duho... you have to think of it not as a piece of furniture, but rather as a symbolic location of where the chief would stand. This particular object is too small for actually a human being sitting on it. Therefore just the fact that you're sitting, or crouching, on top of it, already - like the thrones of the monarchies - distinguishes this individual from everybody else. What is interesting is, all the wooden seats that we know of in the Caribbean, including this one, tend to be male, or they are marked with the male gender. And like in this case, they sometimes show the male genitalia under the seat. And that's because this seat is actually an anthropomorphic personage. Think of it as a human being on four legs, and what you sit [on] is on the back of this personage. And that's why the genitalia are on there, and you sit on top, almost like if you were sitting over a donkey or a horse, and so on. So the chief is mounting this object, which happens to also be a sentient being. In other words they thought of these things as having 'cemi', that is, a soul."

都何作为领袖的宝座，为村庄或地区首领所有。泰诺的首领没有性别限制，而都何则彰显他们在社会、政治及宗教等方方面面的影响力，对他们的呼风唤雨至为重要。我们发现了至少一个首领坐在都何上下葬的例子。致力于发掘泰诺文化的若泽奥利弗博士解释了都何是如何被利用的：

都何并不是普通家具，而是首领地位的象征。这件物品实在太小，正常人很难坐在上面。有意思的是，我们在加勒比海地区发现的所有木制长凳，包括本文的这条，都是男性的，或是刻画了男性象征物，有时甚至在凳子下方雕刻出男性生殖器官。这种凳子其实是一个拟人化的角色。想象它是一个四肢着地的人，而你正坐在它的背上，就像骑驴或骑马一样。首领就这样骑坐在这件也有感知的物品上。他们认为这样的东西拥有“cemi”,即灵魂。