Sumba

Indonesia adalah negara yang terkenal dengan negara seribu pulau. Salah satu pulau yang ada di Indonesia adalah Pulau Sumba. Pulau Sumba adalah pulau yang berada di Provinsi Nusa Tenggara Timur. Pulau Sumba memiliki empat kabupaten yaitu Sumba Timur, Sumba Tengah,  Sumba Barat, dan Sumba Barat Daya.

Sumba Barat Daya adalah salah satu kabupaten yang memiliki banyak tempat wisata yang indah. Namun kelemahannya adalah Pemerintah Sumba Barat Daya membiarkan masyarakat menjual tanah mereka yang berada di dekat tempat wisata kepada orang asing. Hal ini disebabkan karena tidak adanya aturan daerah yang membatasi masyarakat dalam pembatasan jual beli tanah kepada orang asing dari luar negeri.

Selain itu bangsa asing bukan saja hanya membeli tanah di Sumba Barat Daya tetapi mereka juga membangun suatu usaha ataupun bangunan permanen atas nama dan milik mereka. Orang asing juga membuat usaha dan mempekerjakan Orang Sumba Barat Daya dan mereka menjadi atasan atau bos karena merekalah yang memiliki tempat usaha tersebut.

Terlebih lagi daerah daerah wisata sudah mulai banyak dikuasai oleh orang asing. Inilah yang harus jadi perhatian pemerintah untuk lebih bijaksana dalam mengatasi hal seperti ini yang sedang terjadi di Indonesia.

Penulisan laporan penelitian ini menggunakan metode penelitian studi pustaka dan bertujuan untuk memberi usulan kepada pemerintah daerah di Sumba Barat Daya agar segera membentuk aturan mengenai pembatasan jual beli tanah terhadap orang asing yang berasal dari negara lain.

Kiranya dengan demikian keindahan wisata akan tetap menjadi milik Orang Sumba Barat Daya.

This brief report summarises the main characteristics and initial results of the ethnoarchaeological project conducted on the island of Sumba (Indonesia) between 2015 and 2021 by the Universities of Strasbourg and Dijon (UMR 7044 and 6298). The main issues concerned the study of dolmen construction techniques, the ethnoarchaeozoological implications of the feasting economy, the material traces of forms of political and social organisation and the practice of collective burial.

Ce bref rapport récapitule les principales caractéristiques et les premiers résultats du projet ethnoarchéologique mené sur l’île de Sumba (Indonésie) entre 2015 et 2021 par les Universités de Strasbourg et Dijon (UMR 7044 et 6298). Les principales problématiques ont concerné l’étude des techniques de construction des dolmens, les implications ethnoarchéozoologiques de l’économie du rituel (feasting economy), les traces matérielles des formes d’organisation politiques et sociales et la pratique de la tombe collective.

The research at Lambanapu Site aims to determine the position of Lambanapu in the distribution and development of Austronesian ancestors and their culture in Sumba. The method used is survey, excavation, analysis, and interpretation. The results of the research are skeletal findings and urn burial also artifacts which are pottery, beads, metal jewelry, and stone tools.  From the dating result it is known that Lambanapu Site was inhabited at least 2.000 years ago and from paleantropology analysis, it is estimated that the individuals found from primary and secondary burial in Lambanapu are a mixture of Mongoloid and Australomelanesoid. Genetic mixing is very possible, given the history of the archipelago's occupation which was filled by several waves of great migration in the past. The Lambanapu site has provided an overview of Sumba's ancestral life in the context of the archipelago. The Lamabanapu research results show us, how Lambanapu and Sumba in general rich with historical and cultural values of the past that are very useful for today's life. The wealth of historical and cultural values is not only for local interests, but also to fill the rich history and culture of the archipelago, and even contribute to global history.

Keywords: Lambanapu, prehistoric, Austronesian


Penelitian di Situs Lambanapu bertujuan untuk mengetahui posisi Lambanapu dalam persebaran dan perkembangan leluhur Austronesia dan budayanya di Sumba.  Metode yang dilakukan adalah survei, ekskavasi, analisis, dan interpretasi. Hasil penelitian berupa temuan rangka dan kubur tempayan serta artefak berupa gerabah, manik-manik, perhiasan logam, dan alat batu.  Dari hasil pertanggalan diketahui bahwa setidaknya Situs Lambanapu telah dihuni 2.000 tahun yang lalu. Hasil analisis paleoantropologi diperkirakan individu yang ditemukan di Lambanapu, baik kubur primer maupun sekunder, merupakan percampuran antara Mongoloid dan Australomelanesoid. Percampuran genetika memang sangat memungkinkan terjadi mengingat sejarah hunian Nusantara yang terisi oleh beberapa gelombang migrasi besar pada  masa lampau. Situs Lambanapu telah memberikan gambaran kehidupan leluhur Sumba dalam konteks Nusantara. Hasil penelitian memperlihatkan betapa Lambanapu dan Sumba pada umumnya memiliki kekayaan nilai sejarah dan budaya masa lampau yang sangat bermanfaat bagi kehidupan masa kini. Kekayaan nilai sejarah dan budayanya tidak hanya untuk kepentingan lokal, tetapi juga untuk mengisi kekayaan sejarah dan budaya Nusantara, bahkan kontribusi bagi sejarah global.

Kata kunci : Lambanapu, prasejarah, Austronesia

Ethnoarchaeology of funeral practices: Aspects of the management of current dolmens and collective tombs in the tribal societies of Sumba Island (Indonesia)

The megalithic societies of the European Neolithic period are characterized by the association of megalithic architecture with the practice of the collective grave. While several ethnoarchaeologists have produced important works on the architecture and social significance of the megaliths, there are very few detailed analyses devoted to their content, i.e. the collective grave itself. This topic was the main objective of a research programme conducted between 2015 and 2018. A first article provided a general overview and a comparison between the practices of traditional societies established in two Indonesian islands, Sumba and Sulawesi (Jeunesse, Denaire 2018). Here, we focus on Sumba, one of the small Sunda islands, located in the south-east of the Indonesian Archipelago (fig. 1). The western part of the island is settled by segmented societies formed by politically independent clans and villages. This area thus constitutes the last place in the world where the "megalithic monument + collective grave" couple can still be observed alive, in the context of still partly animistic societies. Our main field of investigation was the Lolli ethnic group (fig. 2), with, in particular, an exhaustive analysis of the graves in the village of Wesaluri.

Methods: As a reminder, if collective burials documented in ethnohistory can display extremely variable characteristics and functioning modes in detail, what makes their most profund unity is that they are used repeatedly and are intended to gather dead persons deposited on several occasions. At the time they are established, they are planned to receive more dead people later, those being in principle not all dead yet. The other essential common property of collective burials is that in all documented cases they are established to group kin: they gather people being related by consanguinity, affinity or adoption. In archaeology, the recognition of collective burials relies on osteological arguments: a grave is termed ‘collective’ whenever it is possible to demonstrate that all the individuals have not been deposited at one time –which amounts to saying that the grave was used on several occasions (Boulestin / Courtaud Forthcoming).

Grave data was collected in two Lolli villages, Wesaluri and Tambera. Their collection begins with a census of the houses and their clan and lineage affiliation and continues with the study of the connections between the dolmens and the houses (fig. 10). Then comes the systematic investigation lineage by lineage, this social formation being the relevant level for the study of the forms of management of the dolmens and the collective tomb. The interlocutor is generally the head of the lineage, flanked or not by other inhabitants of the village, often traditional priests (rato) whose function implies a good mastery of genealogy. The main lineage of Wesaluri, for example, controls six dolmens, four located in front of the veranda of the ancestors' house (house B), occupied generation after generation by the head of the lineage, the other two located in the rice fields, about 400 m as the crow flies from the house. Before going on to establish the biographies of the dolmens, it is necessary to get as precise an idea as possible of the genealogy of the lineage (fig. 11). House B is the house of the village founder, Pale Poti 1. Our informant in the survey conducted in 2017 was his great-grandson, Toda Mogu Wole. Toda Mogu Wole died in 2018, leaving the chieftaincy to his youngest son, Lukas Lede Toda, accordind to the Lolli's rule of ultimogeniture. It should be noted in passing that the first three lineage chiefs each had two wives.

Genealogy serves as a support for the construction of dolmens' biographies. Dolmen 7, one of the tombs managed by the founding lineage, houses the remains of seven individuals from four distinct generations and continues to be active (fig. 12). It was built on the occasion of the death of the village founder's second wife. Dolmen 6 (fig. 13) was built on the occasion of the death of the second wife of Bura Sele, son of the founder and his successor at the head of the lineage. It also contains the remains of seven individuals from four different generations. The fact that it runs parallel to Dolmen 7 is obviously not without implications. We will come back to this aspect later. This biographical work was carried out in 2017 and 2018 for all the dolmens in the village of Wesaluri, which will be our main source for this article. The exploitation of the data is in progress and we will limit ourselves here to summarizing our first observations. Among the preferred avenues is the exploration of kinship links both within the same dolmen and between the different dolmens managed by the same lineage.

Some results

Dolmen pools: The study of the main lineage of the village of Wesaluri showed that a single lineage used several collective graves in parallel. It is these groupings of collective tombs used simultaneously, and not successively, that we call "pools of dolmens". The system of the pools of dolmens used simultaneously by the same reference group is counter-intuitive with respect to the scheme commonly postulated in research on European Neolithic collective tombs, where it is customary to consider, implicitly, as successive the different dolmens of the same complex that are presumed to belong to the same reference population. Thus, the construction of a new dolmen is considered to be the consequence of the disaffection of the "active" dolmen. Within this paradigm, two dolmens used simultaneously (if we have the means to demonstrate it, which is another matter) will automatically, in a archaeological context, be attributed to two different reference groups. The use of the pool system in Sumba obviously does not allow us to conclude that such a system also existed in the European Neolithic. It simply makes us attentive to a possibility that has so far been little (if ever) taken into account by the specialists of this period.

Hiatus : The study of Neolithic collective tombs shows the existence of hiatuses in the use of the monument that can last several generations, whereas archaeologists generally start from the idea that a collective tomb welcomes all the members of a reference group generation after generation. Such hiatuses also exist in the dolmens of the villages we studied. Highlighting the dolmen pool system allows us to explain where the missing dead are buried, but does not indicate the causes of the hiatuses. The second part of the article is devoted to the study of these causes, in the context of the segmented societies of Sumba.

Kin relationships: The study of kinship ties in the dolmens of Wesaluri remains largely to be done. In this last part, we will limit ourselves to a few general remarks intended to illustrate the complexity of the configurations encountered and the importance of the ethnoarchaeological model we try to elaborate within a more general reflection on the understanding of collective practice in the megalithic cultures of the European Neolithic, with a particular emphasis on the delicate question of the interpretation of the results of palaeogenomic analyses. The preliminary results we present again come from the study of the main lineage of the village of Wesaluri. We have analysed the influence of the pool system on the composition of the various collective graves and the kinship ties between the deceased buried there, and the way in which the kinship ties of the collective graves are conditioned by social organisation in general. But we have also studied the impact on the genetic composition of the collective grave population of rare events such as divorce, individual adoption and the integration of families from other ethnic groups. The ultimate objective will be, in a context where the identity of the deceased and their kinship ties are known, to develop a reference model for a society with patrilineal and patrilocal clans.

Kodi is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 20,000 people living in the western part of the island of Sumba (NTT, Indonesia). In 2018, a project was launched to publish school curriculum in Kodi for a multilingual education program. This requires a standardized writing system for Kodi. One challenge for writing Kodi is that, unlike Indonesian, Kodi does not have any voiced stops; but it does have a set of implosive stops. We found three competing proposals for how to write implosive sounds. One is to use the grapheme used for the voiced stop sounds in Indonesian, co-opting <b> and <d> for the bilabial and alveolar implosives. A second proposal is to use a digraph combining the letter <h> with the grapheme representing a stop at the relevant place of articulation: <bh> and <dh>. A third proposal is to use an apostrophe as a diacritic: <b'> and <d'>. We employed three methods for working with Kodi speakers in order to come to a consensus on how to write implosives sounds. First, we worked with Kodi speakers in a two-day participatory workshop for alphabet design. Second, we designed a survey to informally check the opinions of Kodi speakers on competing proposals for writing words with implosives. Third, we organized a consultative meeting to invite the opinion of key stakeholders in the community. Through this process, we came to the tentative conclusion that there is enough community consensus to move forward with the use of the digraphs, <bh> and <dh>, to write implosives in Kodi. However, a recent publication in Kodi has caused us to re-evaluate the possible advantages of using <b> and <d> for implosives.

Arts and Traditions of Sumba is a bilingual ( English and French) book describing the traditions, culture and people of the Sumba Island in Indonesia. The book contains picture of  over 500 objects of the collection of the authors- It can be ordered via Amazon.fr, and Fnac.com. or lelivredart.com