In the context of globalization and rapid societal changes, preserving sacred landscapes is vital for cultural identity and resilience. This study investigates the concept of liminality within the cultural landscape of Neira Island, emphasizing the significance of the Buka Kampung ritual and keramat (sacred objects) as integral components of Neira landscape identity. Through qualitative analysis and case studies, the study explores how these rituals serve as liminal practices that mediate between continuity and transformation. The findings highlight that the act of making offerings at keramat during the Buka Kampung ritual fosters social cohesion and reinforces collective identity. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between sacredness, rituals, and identity, demonstrating how these elements shape place attachment, collective memory, and the lived experiences of local communities. It highlights the importance of sacred landscapes in fostering community resilience and cultural continuity, offering insights into the role of ritual practices in heritage preservation.

Hikayat Lonthoir, a rare saga manuscript collection originating from the Banda Archipelago, Maluku, Indonesia, retains significant Indigenous oral history amidst the Western colonial narrative. This study seeks to leverage computational methods to analyze the historic manuscript that constitutes a combination of OCR-supervised transcription, corpus linguistic profiling, semantic clustering (Word2Vec + K-Means), and named entity network analysis. A validation of the dataset is performed on 2793 cleaned word tokens towards Indonesian and Malay dictionaries, showing that 50.3% overlapped with both dictionaries, with strong cross-dictionary agreement (κ = 0.76). The lexical analysis indicates that monarchy/governance, kinship, maritime vocabulary, and extensive morphological productivity (me-, di-, ter-, pe-/per-, -nya, -an), while semantic and network analyses identify two narrative cores, developed into Aarne–Thompson–Uther (ATU) and Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature classification systems. These findings demonstrate how computational methods can extract structural, thematic, and relational patterns from historical manuscripts and contribute evidence-based insights to digital philology and historical linguistics.