A synthesis of Caribbean archaeology running from the earliest flaked-stone and archaic settlers to the century after Columbus, assembled island by island out of excavations the two authors and their colleagues have run across some twenty territories. Keegan and Hofman push back on the habit of measuring every indigenous community against a Classic Taino standard drawn from Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, a frame that defines other groups by what they lack, and they treat inherited labels such as Saladoid, Ostionoid, Ciboney and Island Carib as terms that obscure as much as they fix. Their governing image is the kaleidoscope: a fixed set of elements whose pattern shifts with the smallest change of view. Site by site, from Banwari Trace in Trinidad to El Flaco in the Dominican Republic and MC-6 in Middle Caicos, they find mobility, exchange and transculturation producing local variety rather than one culture cleanly succeeding another.