This thesis aims to examine ontologies of personhood and the body in the colonial Americas. Working from the idea that colonialism involves a meeting of different worlds, I will adopt a comparative approach to consider how different ideas about what it means to be a person – and to have a body – were negotiated across a section of the Spanish colonial world. I will synthesise and compare case studies from Central America and the Caribbean, examining a range of objects, sites and landscapes to consider the various ways in which colonial personhood was assembled. I aim to explore how differing ways of being a person affected the ways in which European and Indigenous groups related to one another, while developing a theoretical approach that offers a means to conceptualise and probe the various tensions and continuities that arose in historical periods of culture contact.