This chapter broadens the scope of the Java-centric politics of archaeology and heritage towards Sumatra. The first archaeological activities on Sumatra, performed in the context of the colonial state, dated from the start of the nineteenth century. But it was during the second half of the nineteenth century that the now ‘archaeological’ sites of South Sumatra were more systematically inventoried and appropriated in the context of historical and ethnographic descriptions, geographical expeditions, military conquest, and the establishment of governmental structures. This chapter examines how South Sumatra, in particular Palembang, the Pasemah area, and Jambi, became gradually incorporated in the colonial archaeological infrastructure, as it was developed in Batavia, the administrative centre of the expanding colony. It focuses on interactions between state-supported ‘modern’ heritage concepts, local and regional appropriations of certain archaeological sites and objects, and the development of nationalist history writing by Sumatra-born Indonesians who also included the early past of Sumatra.

This chapter, situated in the twentieth century, returns to Majapahit and analyses how and why it became a proto-national site, despite the lack of evidence of its greatness, and despite criticism from philological, Islamic, and communist voices. Both local and centralising colonial state-supported and Indonesian nationalist site interventions played a role in the makings of this site. At the site, Javanese nobleman and administrator Kromodjojo Adinegoro, who was born and raised in the region, and the Indies-born architect and self-taught archaeologist Henri Maclaine Pont stimulated long-term local engagement with the site. Meanwhile, for Indonesian nationalists active in Batavia, Majapahit shifted from a Greater Javanese site into a Java-centred proto-Indonesian one. Yet, this development does not mean that the interests of the different parties engaging with the site stopped, nor that alternative engagements (of religious or spiritual character) faded away.