Ewan
20th February 2018, 13:12
Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped around 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos. While the American public was focused on the war in neighboring Vietnam, the US military was waging a devastating covert campaign to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines through the small Southeast Asian country.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/laos-vietnam-war-us-bombing-uxo/
In the midst of all that sat an ancient site that is commonly called the Plain of Jars (http://plainofjars.net/prehist.htm).
The local inhabitants say that the jars were made for brewing alcohol, to be consumed at a great feast to celebrate an illustrious military victory thousands of years ago. Legend tells of an evil king, named Chao Angka, who oppressed his people so terribly that they appealed to a good king to the north, named Khun Jeuam, to liberate them. Khun Jeuam and his army came, and after waging a great battle on the plain, defeated Chao Angka.
Perhaps 2,000 years old, the relics are one of the oldest archeological wonders of Southeast Asia. They have survived looters, the elements, and American bombs, but for decades were largely forgotten in the chaos and conflict that swept Laos
In the 1930s, French archeologist Madeline Colani documented the jars in a 600-page monograph, The Megaliths of Upper Laos, She discovered some jars contained bronze and iron tools, and bracelets, along with cowry shells and glass beads, while the rest appeared to have been looted, and concluded that they were funeral urns carved by a vanished Bronze Age people. This theory has been strengthened by the more recent discovery of underground burial chambers.
A little more than a mile northeast of Ponsavan lies the principal jar site, called Ban Ang, known as Site 1, containing more than 250 urns. In her words "They are disposed without regularity, some of them pressing one against another, others quite isolated. Each one is fashioned from a separate block of stone, and a small number of them are very well executed, as though turned on a lathe, bespeaking the hand of a true artist." Here, there also is a cave, which she believed served as the crematorium, having found ashes and bones inside it.
A recent excavation in 1994, exposed a carving of a human figure on the side of the jar, the first anthropomorphic image recorded at the site. Nearby, eight to twelve inches below the soil surface, seven flat stones, each covering a pit were also discovered. Six of the pits contained human bones and the seventh contained a two-foot-tall burial jar with small pieces of bone and teeth inside.
These pits are proposed to be sites of secondary burials, a practice in which the corpse is left to decompose or 'distill' into it's essence, a practice that has been common in Thailand and Laos (and other regions) up to the present (to dry out the body and rot the soft tissue before cremation). So the unifying theory is that, the corpses of poor people were placed in pits, while those of the nobility and rich people were placed in the urns to dry out. This would explain their large size. Once they had been cremated in the cave, the ashes of the elite were returned to the urns, or perhaps buried in a sacred place, freeing the jars for re-use to decompose another body.
To date, more than 60 jar fields have been identified, usually situated on promontories and other strategically high places. The tallest jars are more than 3 meters in height and over a meter in width, and weighing several tons. A few have carved symbols which are still visible. Circular stone discs found near the jars, presumed to be lids, are also sometimes carved, with one having a recognizable representation of a monkey. A distinctive figure inscribed on several of the funeral urns, known as the 'frogman*', may link the civilisation to cultures as far afield as Yunnan and Indonesia
As usual I have trouble accepting such a theory. These jars were made from stone and by the accepted practices must have taken an age to carve out. There are literally thousands of them. I don't believe you would make a new jar every time someone died, I think it more likely that later peoples utilised what they found for various purposes. In image 3, below, it doesn't look a particularly well thought out design for dessicating a body for instance.
https://yandex.com/images/search?text=laos%20plain%20of%20jars
http://www.newsps.ru/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/kyvshin.jpg
http://static.nationalgeographic.com.tr/Common/Images/Articles/1260/2536_a_2.jpg
http://ancientufo.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/plainofjars.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvku5CEhW1k
Part 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoj5JsdYtn8) , Part 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfzFTWN1aMA)
Drone flight over the Plain of Jars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWVEeA4FXY
Further reading
http://www.crystalinks.com/plainofjars.html
http://plainofjars.net/prehist.htm
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/death-from-below-in-the-world-s-most-bombed-country-1.3078351
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/laos-the-most-heavily-bombed-country-on-earth.html
*-I looked for images of the 'Frogman' carved in some jars but without luck.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/laos-vietnam-war-us-bombing-uxo/
In the midst of all that sat an ancient site that is commonly called the Plain of Jars (http://plainofjars.net/prehist.htm).
The local inhabitants say that the jars were made for brewing alcohol, to be consumed at a great feast to celebrate an illustrious military victory thousands of years ago. Legend tells of an evil king, named Chao Angka, who oppressed his people so terribly that they appealed to a good king to the north, named Khun Jeuam, to liberate them. Khun Jeuam and his army came, and after waging a great battle on the plain, defeated Chao Angka.
Perhaps 2,000 years old, the relics are one of the oldest archeological wonders of Southeast Asia. They have survived looters, the elements, and American bombs, but for decades were largely forgotten in the chaos and conflict that swept Laos
In the 1930s, French archeologist Madeline Colani documented the jars in a 600-page monograph, The Megaliths of Upper Laos, She discovered some jars contained bronze and iron tools, and bracelets, along with cowry shells and glass beads, while the rest appeared to have been looted, and concluded that they were funeral urns carved by a vanished Bronze Age people. This theory has been strengthened by the more recent discovery of underground burial chambers.
A little more than a mile northeast of Ponsavan lies the principal jar site, called Ban Ang, known as Site 1, containing more than 250 urns. In her words "They are disposed without regularity, some of them pressing one against another, others quite isolated. Each one is fashioned from a separate block of stone, and a small number of them are very well executed, as though turned on a lathe, bespeaking the hand of a true artist." Here, there also is a cave, which she believed served as the crematorium, having found ashes and bones inside it.
A recent excavation in 1994, exposed a carving of a human figure on the side of the jar, the first anthropomorphic image recorded at the site. Nearby, eight to twelve inches below the soil surface, seven flat stones, each covering a pit were also discovered. Six of the pits contained human bones and the seventh contained a two-foot-tall burial jar with small pieces of bone and teeth inside.
These pits are proposed to be sites of secondary burials, a practice in which the corpse is left to decompose or 'distill' into it's essence, a practice that has been common in Thailand and Laos (and other regions) up to the present (to dry out the body and rot the soft tissue before cremation). So the unifying theory is that, the corpses of poor people were placed in pits, while those of the nobility and rich people were placed in the urns to dry out. This would explain their large size. Once they had been cremated in the cave, the ashes of the elite were returned to the urns, or perhaps buried in a sacred place, freeing the jars for re-use to decompose another body.
To date, more than 60 jar fields have been identified, usually situated on promontories and other strategically high places. The tallest jars are more than 3 meters in height and over a meter in width, and weighing several tons. A few have carved symbols which are still visible. Circular stone discs found near the jars, presumed to be lids, are also sometimes carved, with one having a recognizable representation of a monkey. A distinctive figure inscribed on several of the funeral urns, known as the 'frogman*', may link the civilisation to cultures as far afield as Yunnan and Indonesia
As usual I have trouble accepting such a theory. These jars were made from stone and by the accepted practices must have taken an age to carve out. There are literally thousands of them. I don't believe you would make a new jar every time someone died, I think it more likely that later peoples utilised what they found for various purposes. In image 3, below, it doesn't look a particularly well thought out design for dessicating a body for instance.
https://yandex.com/images/search?text=laos%20plain%20of%20jars
http://www.newsps.ru/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/kyvshin.jpg
http://static.nationalgeographic.com.tr/Common/Images/Articles/1260/2536_a_2.jpg
http://ancientufo.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/plainofjars.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvku5CEhW1k
Part 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoj5JsdYtn8) , Part 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfzFTWN1aMA)
Drone flight over the Plain of Jars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWVEeA4FXY
Further reading
http://www.crystalinks.com/plainofjars.html
http://plainofjars.net/prehist.htm
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/death-from-below-in-the-world-s-most-bombed-country-1.3078351
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/laos-the-most-heavily-bombed-country-on-earth.html
*-I looked for images of the 'Frogman' carved in some jars but without luck.