Oliver studies a class of portable sacred objects — cemís — that the native peoples of the Greater Antilles treated as living, potent beings rather than as representations. His question is what their scatter across the islands reveals about the ties among the people who owned, inherited, gave away and seized them.

He concentrates on large three-pointed stones, stone heads, stone collars, elbow stones and the face-masks called guaízas, most of them now in museum collections, and reads them against sixteenth-century Spanish accounts, above all the report Ramón Pané compiled for Columbus. Theories of gift exchange and of personhood, drawn largely from Melanesian ethnography, supply the framework.

Along the way Oliver revises the cultural scheme inherited from Irving Rouse and reconsiders what the word Taíno can properly be made to carry, before turning to the struggles over these objects in Cuba, Boriquén and Hispaniola.