For more than a century, the giant stone jars scattered across northern Laos have been one of Southeast Asia’s oldest archaeological mysteries. And spread out over remote hillsides and forests on the Plain of Jars, they have generated hundreds of theories about how they functioned: storage containers, religious monuments, or a forgotten funerary tradition?
New excavations at Site 75 are providing some of the strongest evidence yet that at least some of these enigmatic monuments served as communal burial chambers.
At the heart of the discovery is Jar 1, an unusually large stone vessel that has never been unearthed in Laos. Many jars in the Plain of Jars have been empty and heavily disturbed, but Jar 1 provided a rare opportunity to study the human remains and grave goods.
Archaeologists found at least 37 individuals buried in the jar, meaning that the jar was a collective grave site at some point in the past.
The most striking aspect of the discovery is in the way the bones were buried. Rather than entire skeletons, researchers found tightly packed and disarticulated remains, long bones set in a cluster and skull fragments, and so on. This suggests that the bodies, usually buried elsewhere before they could decompose and then taken to the jar, might have been secondarily buried.
Jar 1 was in use from AD 890 to 1160, radiocarbon dating indicates, meaning that it was an important mortuary site for centuries. The dates are from a period of massive change in Asia, as rapidly expanding trade networks connected far-flung communities from China to the Indian Ocean.
The jar contents show that those who buried their dead here were connected to those larger exchange systems. In addition to pottery fragments, excavators unearthed an iron knife, a copper-alloy bell and a collection of glass beads. Some of those beads may have come from South Asia, and some others may have been transported via trade routes to the Middle East.
These findings refute long-standing assumptions that communities in the uplands of Laos were isolated from more general regional change. Instead, they suggest that they were part of large commercial and cultural networks that connected mainland Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.
The findings also raise new questions about how the Plain of Jars served as the mortuary landscape. A nearby cluster of tiny stone jars at Site 75 produced similar artefacts but no human remains. Theories are that these vessels were used in the earlier stages of the burial process as temporary repositories where bodies decomposed before bones were sent into larger communal jars like Jar 1.
If correct, this could explain why so many jars in the Plain of Jars have been found empty, despite their purported funerary associations.
The findings are also in line with recent work at other major jar sites including Site 1, where Dougald O’Reilly and Louise Shewan have recorded elaborate burial practices in the megalithic landscape. It is clear from these investigations that mortuary practices were far more diverse and sophisticated than has been understood up to this point.
Rather than being a single standardised practice, the jar sites seem to have been part of a wider funerary network that varied from region to region and community to community. The collective burial found in Jar 1 indicates that different groups may have adapted the monuments in different ways yet maintained cultural traditions.
There is much work to be done. Scientists are currently working on detailed bioanthropological analysis of the human remains and ancient DNA investigations that may shed new light on ancestry, kinship and population movements in prehistoric Laos.
Those investigations could bring archaeologists closer to answering one of the Plain of Jars’ most persistent questions: who were the people responsible for creating these extraordinary stone landscapes?
More than a hundred years after the jars first caught international attention, the discoveries at Site 75 are beginning to reveal not only how they were used but also the lives, beliefs and connections of the communities that constructed them.
Souces : Antiquity – The article, ‘The death jar: a new mortuary tradition at the Plain of Jars, Lao PDR’, is out now open access in Antiquity.
