Sumba

The Sumba are an Austronesian people of Sumba Island in the Lesser Sunda chain, where settlers from the late Neolithic raised megalithic monuments, a tradition that survived for millennia. Their Marapu faith binds ancestor and deity worship, centred on hilltop villages, carved grave stones and hinggi cloth.

In medieval times Sumbanese traders exported fine timber and fragrant resin, and horses brought by Arab merchants thrived in the dry savanna, making horse breeding a mark of chiefly wealth. From the 1300s the island was nominally tributary to Majapahit and later to courts in Sumbawa and Sulawesi, but power stayed with rival local lords. Their wars fed a slave trade and left Sumba divided among petty chiefdoms into the colonial era.