This intriguing but also frustrating book is a catalogue that illustrates, describes, and discusses the representations of animals in the styles of the prehistoric Saladoid ceramic horizon. Most of these animal images are adornos: small sculptured figures, sometimes painted, attached to the rims and handles of pottery vessels for cooking and serving. Rarer are effigy vessels in the form of animals. Rarer still are animal images merged with those of other animals or with humans. Although the title mentions only the lesser Antilles, the text makes extensive comparisons with the animal imagery of earlier Saladoid pottery in the South American mainland: the Orinoco and Caribbean coast. After an introduction and explanation of the author's approach, the book proceeds with chapters on different animal groups: mammals of the land and water, bats, birds, and reptiles and amphibians. The author characterizes the different taxa and the roles they play, both in their environments and in the mythology of indigenous cultures of the tropical lowlands and Antilles. The book is based on the author's dissertation research: a first-hand study of hundreds of examples of pottery fragments and whole vessels from numerous collections of Saladoid pottery in the lesser Antilles. In tables at the back of the book the author lists the numbers of animals he has identified in different regions, and in the text he seeks to explain the possible ecological causes of the variations in their distribution in the region. His explanations use information about indigenous societies from several ethnographic monographs on indigenous cultures that survived into the 20th and 21st centuries in South America.

The book is a worthy and useful contribution, firstly because it introduces readers to Saladoid, an exquisite and complex prehistoric art style of the Caribbean mainland and islands, about which little been published in venues easily accessible to the public. The book is also interesting for readers because it draws attention not only to the intricate and sensitive images of animals in the ancient art style but also to the living animals themselves, their ecological niches, and the indigenous artists and their cultures. Readers can learn about ancient art, indigenous societies, tropical lowland habitats, and some of their animals. The book also is enjoyable to read because the author has considerable ability to express his ideas skillfully and evocatively. His occasional extended riffs about habitats and the way animals interact with them are delightful in themselves.

One of the author's goals is to delineate and explain the history of Saladoid iconography from its origin in the Orinoco to its culmination in the Greater Antilles. But the book is quite flawed by inaccuracies in areas that are important to this goal: the identification of animal images, the character of habitats, the occurrence of different animals in the art of different places and times, and the roles of men and women in indigenous cultures. Sharp-eyed readers will find fault with some of his identifications. For example, several of his “birds” do not have beaks, but mammal muzzles with mouths and nostrils at their tips. His enumeration of the animal images in early Venezuelan Saladoid styles in the tables are not at all accurate. He leaves out most of the taxa readily identifiable in published pottery objects: tapirs, peccaries, sloths, dolphins, porpoises, manatees, and insect larvae. Readers consulting the tables will not find statistical evaluations or even totals. As for his comparisons of habitats, he says that the Orinoco floodplains lack the mountain views and large aquatic turtles the islands have. However, as photographs in the literature clearly show, the Guiana Shield mountains loom across the Orinoco from several of the sites he mentions, and aquatic turtles more than a meter long reach there, too. The literature on Saladoid cultures and their habitats in the Orinoco is not extensive, and easily accessible publications document the iconographic and environmental patterns that he gets wrong. Such errors take away from the validity of the explanations that he bases on them.

Another problem of the book is that Waldron insists the early Saladoid potters of the Orinoco must have been Arawak speakers, based on historical linguistics. However, the language maps in the literature that he cites relied on interpretations that were not based on comprehensive linguistic analyses, necessary to establish languages' relations to a family or subfamily (according to Da Silva Facundes, in Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language and Culture Area in Amazonia, pp. 74–96), not to speak of their relations to prehistoric pottery. As Samuel Wilson, an author Waldron cites but does not heed, says: “In Northern South America, given the cultural complexity, movements of groups, and difficulties interpreting the archaeological record, it is very difficult to employ these [linguistic] methods with any precision (The Archaeology of the Caribbean, p. 65).” Because Waldron looks at ethnographic evidence regardless of language family, why was it so important to claim that the Saladoid were Arawak?

Waldron acknowledges that the Saladoid artists were women but shows little interest in indigenous women's culture, eschewing sources such as C. Hugh-Jones, J. Siskind, R. Murphy and Y. Murphy, and A. Gebhart-Sayer, as examples focusing on men's culture. Speaking of gender, the grating ethnocentrism Waldron injects into the ancient cultures follows western dichotomous gender bias in the qualities he assigns to males and females, such as active versus passive. He characterizes the male Sun as the chief indigenous deity, but many of the groups he mentions also emphasize a female personage called Woman Shaman, who was, above all, aggressive rather than passive in their telling. For them, she was the creator of the earth and ruler of the dark spirit world and its denizens. They say she brought their ancestors up the Amazon in an Anaconda canoe from the island she ruled at the mouth of the Amazon (Cabalzar, Petroglyphos e concepções socioespaciais dos povos indigenas no alto rio Negro: Entre a origem e os dias de hoje). Waldron could have looked at taped and transcribed ethnographic narratives such as Oko Warao (Heinen, Oko Warao: Marshland People of the Orinoco Delta), which are less filtered by researchers' interpretations. As Waldron mentions but does not heed, western authors' representations may be idiosyncratic and inaccurate.

A less important but still nettlesome flaw is that the author writes in a style that is slapdash and uncritical. It is careless in choice of words and prone to overwrought Greek-derived terminology: zoic instead of animal; Amazonid instead of Amazonian; mimetic instead of realistic. He uses some words inaccurately: metonymy for artworks that do not use a part of an animal to represent the whole but that show the whole animals with certain anatomical features emphasized, such as the “ears” of some owls. Other glitches include a map that, contrary to its legend, does not locate the main groups referred to in the text. The Shipibo and Tukanoans, whom he discusses at length, are not on it. The book would have been more effective for students had the author used technical terms in their commonly understood or dictionary meanings. But he uses geometric idiosyncratically to mean rectilinear as opposed to curvilinear, though the definition is “using simple geometric forms such as circles and squares in design and decoration.” For certain three-pointed objects, he uses trigonal, which actually means triangular with three equal sides and angles, which the objects do not have. He uses the word slips, which means fired ceramic coatings, but like many modern Indian potters, Saladoid potters often used nonceramic, water-soluble paints. He uses the word endemic to mean native to an area, though endemic refers to taxa restricted to a particular locality or region.

Simply reading over what he had written with care and checking meanings could have eliminated such flaws and communicated his interesting ideas about the patterns of art, nature, and human life more effectively.