In the Ngada villages of central Flores the plaza is the design. Packed grey-tan earth, ringed with lichened basalt, carries paired clan monuments down one long axis: the male ngadhu, a carved hardwood shaft under a cone of black sugar-palm fibre, and the female bhaga, a miniature thatched house.

Ngada has no script. The carving is the record — an adzed warrior with sau sword and bhuja spear, buffalo horns at the doorway, flat lenggi slabs where the clan holds court. This system keeps that logic: heavy dark figures, an open earth ground, nothing invented to fill the silence.