A ‘jar’ jammed with human bones may solve Laos’ ‘Plain of Jars’ mystery
The stone vessel held remains of at least 37 ancient people, suggesting a burial ritual
The remains of at least 37 people who died from the 9th to 13th centuries were found in this stone vessel in northeastern Laos.
Nicholas Skopal
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of at least 37 people in a large stone “jar” in northern Laos. The oldest are thought to date from more than 1,000 years ago, and researchers think the jar —a stone vessel more than two meters across — was a “multigenerational” burial site for ancestor worship.
The finding suggests that the thousands of stone “jars” throughout northern Laos had a similar purpose, researchers report May 18 in Antiquity. And it reinforces the idea that the mysterious “Plain of Jars” around the remote Lao town of Phonsavan was a vast ancient burial complex.
The newfound jar is in a forest about 70 kilometers northeast of Phonsavan, on the Xieng Khouang Plateau — a region dotted with thousands of the stone jars. The most well-studied concentration is around Phonsavan itself, but several jars have been found much farther afield and the entire plateau is now considered the Plain of Jars.
Mapping the ‘Plain of Jars’
Ancient stone jars have been found at sites (black dots) across a swath of Laos. The newfound giant jar holding the remains of at least 37 individuals is located at Jar site 75, about 70 kilometers northeast of the modern Lao town of Phonsavan. Its location is designated “Group 1;” the researchers found seven smaller jars at the “Group 2” location. Jar sites 1, 2 and 3 comprise the original “Plain of Jars” around Phonsavan, where more than 600 jars have been found.
Before now, a few of the jars had been found to contain bones or some ashes. But it seemed unlikely that so many would have been carved for burial ceremonies and so their original purpose was a mystery. “The big jar we’ve found is unique, and I’ve seen a lot of jars,” says archaeologist Nicholas Skopal of the Australian National University in Canberra.
The new find finally confirms that the jars were part of ancient burial ceremonies, although their precise use may have varied at different places, Skopal says.
The disarticulation of many of the sets of bones inside the newfound jar suggest they were interred there in a “secondary burial” after the bodies had partially decomposed elsewhere — possibly in smaller jars, several of which were found a short distance away.
“Maybe they used those [smaller] stone jars to ‘distill’ the bodies — so when someone died, they might have put the body in there so all the flesh came off,” Skopal suggests. “Then they took the bones and they put them in this big jar… so it’s almost like a crypt.”
The stone jars near Phonsavan were investigated in the 1930s by the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani. Most are a little more than a meter high, although some are up to three meters tall and weigh several tons. Some jars are lying on their side, and a few were fitted with stone lids.
Colani rejected the popular assumption that the jars were for storing food and water and instead suggested they had a funerary role. (A local legend says giants used the jars to make rice wine.)
The remote region was largely overlooked after Colani’s survey, and modern expeditions have been hampered by the large number of unexploded cluster bombs and other munitions left over from the Vietnam War.
Lao authorities have now cleared many of those munitions. Archaeological studies since the 2000s have found burial pits filled with ancient human remains beside the jars — possibly to decompose before being reinterred.
Colani had estimated that the oldest jars could have been made up to 2,500 years ago in the 5th century B.C. More recent radiocarbon dating of the remains indicates they were originally used in burials from the 9th to the 13th centuries A.D. Some of the jars contained ashes and burned bone fragments from cremations, a later Buddhist tradition, so it is thought they may have been reused for burials after Buddhism was introduced to the region.
Miriam Stark, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, says she had been hoping that such a jar would be found. “This is a collective mortuary assemblage [and] I find that very interesting,” says Stark, who was not involved in the study. She notes, however, that no sign has ever been found of the settlements of the people who had used the jars for burials. “I do wonder, where did these people live?”
Archaeologist Julie Van Den Bergh was one of the first researchers to visit the Plain of Jars in 2004 after parts of it were cleared of unexploded munitions. The new find “offers valuable evidence that helps contextualize earlier findings, including Colani’s work from the 1930s,” says Van Den Bergh, who now directs a private archaeology company in Hong Kong. “It supports the interpretation of the jars as burial or funerary related.”
