The beautiful Sumba textiles with cowry shells make wonderful outdoor textiles. I picked them up from local Singapore furniture shops selling Indoesian teak furniture.
Before colonization, Sumba island was inhabited by several small ethnolinguistic groups, some of which may have had tributary relations to the Majapahit Empire. In 1522 the first ships from Europe arrived, and by 1866 Sumba belonged to the Dutch East Indies, although the island did not come under real Dutch administration until the twentieth century.
The Sumbanese people speak a variety of closely related Austronesian languages and have a mixture of Malay and Melanesian ancestry. Twenty-five to thirty percent of the population practises the animist Marapu religion. The remainder are Christian, a majority being Dutch Calvinist, but a substantial minority being Roman Catholic. A small number of Sunni Muslims can be found along the coastal areas.
Despite the influx of western religions, Sumba is one of the few places in the world in which megalithic burials are used as a 'living tradition' to inter prominent individuals when they die. Burial in megaliths is a practice that was used in many parts of the world during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, but has survived to this day in Sumba (mainly at West Sumba). 
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