Rouse sets out to restore a name and a history to the people Columbus met. They had no collective name for themselves, calling themselves after the islands they lived on; ethnohistorians settled on Taino. He sorts them into Classic groups in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Western groups in Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas, and Eastern groups in the small islands, arguing that populations at the edges stay conservative and shade into their neighbours.

Against the older view that these were recent migrants from the far headwaters of the Amazon, he brings four bodies of evidence — the Spanish chronicles, archaeology, historical linguistics and biology — to a single conclusion. The ancestors did come from South America, traceable to the Orinoco valley, but the Taino themselves took shape within the archipelago over millennia that radiocarbon dating has made visible.

He also separates them sharply from the Island-Caribs, whose alleged cannibalism colonists inflated to license enslaving them.