It Must Have Been Quite the Party

The Plain of Jars ranks alongside Stonehenge in the annals of how the hell did they do that without cranes? Scattered over the hills and vales of the central Xieng Khouang plateau, the Plain of Jars is something of a misnomer, as there are 90 individual sites. The megalithic jars come in ones and threes and hundreds; upright, sideways, tilted, or with giant holes in the middle. Some have lids, others' lids have fallen off, but remarkably few were blown apart during the US bombing of Laos. Only a handful of sites have been cleared of UXO, though, and these only in 2004 and 2007.

We stayed in Phonsavanh, a provincial capital close to three major jar sites. We rented a 125cc Chinese motorbike and coated our lungs and clothes with red dust to get to the jar sites. The road looked more like a construction zone than anything else most of them time, and sometimes we had to wait for the cows to pass.

The visitors' center at the bottom of Jars Site 1 was only erected in August 2013; it's a shack with vinyl posters of information in English about the history of the sites and ongoing efforts to make them safe for visitors.We visited sites 1, 2, and 3, and each of them was different: 2 was at the top of a hill overlooking swathes of farmland; 3 was in the midst of a forest grove with trees shooting through the cracking jars; and 1 comprised hundreds of jars wrapped around the fields and hillocks surrounding a large cave.

There are simply some places that feel sacred, and this is one.

Phil adds: Having passed through these fields of millennium-old relics, to stand in the dark central cave and look back at the bright round entrance filled me all at once with a fleeting, mildly alarming awareness that we might somehow getting trapped in the cave. Having recently reread the 2,500-year-old poem The Odyssey (in which, at one point, the heroes get trapped in a cave with a monster) before our departure from the US, I suddenly felt that to see the cave entrance this way was an ancient, universal human experience. I sensed a momentary overlap, or continuity, with the other humans, with their own fears and aspirations, who had stood in this cave a thousand years earlier.

It's been nearly 90 years since the most comprehensive book on the Plain of Jars was published, in 1935, by French geologist Madeleine Colani. She found evidence that the Plain of Jars was an Iron Age burial site, replete with burnt teeth and bone fragments showing signs of cremation. Around the jars she found human bones, pottery fragments, iron and bronze objects, glass and stone beads, ceramic weights and charcoal. The jars have been dated to the late first or early second millenium BCE. Later research, in 1994 and then during UX clearance in 2004, support this interpretation, that the cremated remains in the jars and the uncremated remains buried outside of the jars are contemporary.

Just hangin' at Jar Site 3

This urn phated phor Phil.

Life from death.

The miniature ecosystem inside one jar.

They're dangerous.

The lingering question is why half the remains are cremated and half aren't. It's especially strange (and spoOooOooOoky) because the cremated remains belong mainly to adolescents. One connection that's been made is to royal mortuary practices in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. In the contemporary royal family, the corpse of the deceased is placed into an urn during the early stages of the funeral rites. The ritual decomposition represents the gradual transformation from the earthly to the spiritual world, and then the body is cremated and buried.

But the best story is by far the traditional Lao myth, in which Khun Cheung, king of giants, fought and won an epic battle. Afterwards he commissioned the jars to brew massive amounts of lao hai rice wine, and everyone got royally drunk.