Archaeologists excavating a large stone jar near Phonsavan in central Laos have found densely packed human remains, linking the mysterious “Plain of Jars” to mortuary practice after decades of speculation. Radiocarbon dating places the deposition in multiple p
A giant stone jar. 1.3 metres high and more than 2 metres wide. has started telling a story that the Plain of Jars in Laos has long withheld.. In its interior near the town of Phonsavan. researchers found human remains so tightly packed that the jar’s purpose can no longer be treated as a guessing game.
The discovery comes from the Xieng Khouang plateau in central Laos. where thousands of giant stone jars—some around 3 metres high and weighing several tonnes—stand amid one of South-East Asia’s most puzzling ancient landscapes.. For decades, the biggest questions have been simple and brutal: who made these jars, and what were they for?
Old tales. including a version told in stories tied to the jars. claim they were made for giants who used them for brewing rice wine.. Investigations in the 1930s pushed a different theory: the jars were associated with the South-East Asian Iron Age. roughly between about 500 BC and AD 500. and were used to cremate or decompose bodies.
More recent work complicated that picture. Studies found glass beads, jewellery and a few cremated remains, along with burials near the jars but not within them. Now, the new excavation has changed that balance.
In the jar near Phonsavan, the team found the right femurs and skulls from 19 individuals—but teeth from 37 people.. The way the remains were arranged mattered: the bones were neatly packed in. with longer bones laid out towards the edges.. Many smaller, more fragile bones were missing, and the deposits seem to have built up over time.
Radiocarbon dating of samples showed the remains were deposited in multiple phases over up to 270 years. between the 9th and 12th centuries AD.. Nigel Chang. of James Cook University and not involved in the research. called it “an incredibly consequential discovery.” After almost 100 years of speculation. he said it is the first of these stone jars to be investigated with “irrefutable association with mortuary behaviour.”
The jar itself, though, is only part of the evidence.. About 500 metres from the big, primary jar, the team found a group of smaller stone jars, some containing glass beads.. Nick Skopal. at James Cook University. suggests a practical sequence: dead bodies may have been placed inside the smaller jars until the flesh deteriorated. and then the bones were moved into the larger jar.
That idea fits with questions the excavation forces back onto the human world behind the stones. Skopal also floated a possibility tied to belief. “Were the stone jars some way for the soul to be released and be prepared for the afterlife as part of ancestor worship?” he asked.
To move beyond ritual speculation, the team plans to test the remains more directly. Skopal said they are doing DNA testing on the remains inside the jar, aiming to understand who these people were and how they were related to each other.
Even so. the dating still has one important blind spot: it shows when the jar was used. not when it was made.. Skopal said the team’s dating of artefacts excavated outside the jar matches what’s inside it. suggesting the jar was placed there when the first bodies were put inside.. That alignment, he said, is starting to point toward a medieval culture rather than an Iron Age practice.
Chang agreed that the timeline of activity around jar sites appears concentrated in the second half of the first millennium AD, but added his own judgment: the jars themselves may be older, dating from 2000 or more years ago.
The Plain of Jars has never looked uniform, and that unevenness may be the key to why multiple theories persisted.. Skopal said there is great variance in how the jars were used.. At some sites, jars are generally upright and many are empty, perhaps because of looting.. At other sites, many jars lie flat, with shallower or narrower internal cavities.. Those differences, he said, imply changes in rites between regions or over time.
Other researchers see the same tradition spreading beyond a single community.. Tiatoshi Jamir. at Nagaland University in India. said it’s “very likely that numerous cultural groups could have utilised the jars. or the same cultural group used the same jar as a mortuary facility over an extended period of time.”
The jar’s contents also carry evidence of movement—of people, trade, and connection.. Skopal’s team found iron tools, earthenware, a copper-based bell and glass beads inside the jar.. Chemical analysis revealed the beads were produced in South India and Mesopotamia, indicating long-distance travel and trade.
Skopal said that level of exchange makes sense. Around AD 1000 was a flourishing period across East and South-East Asia, including the Song Dynasty and Dali Kingdom in China, Cambodia’s Khmer Empire and the Pagan kingdom in what is now Myanmar.
Archaeology is increasingly tracing a wider cultural pattern for these funerary traditions.. Marco Mitri. at North Eastern Hill University in India. who has worked on similar stone jars in north-east India more than 1000 kilometres away. said the jars point to an extensive cultural tradition.. He suggested a widespread Austroasiatic population engaged in these funerary traditions for hundreds of years. with similar rites still carried on today in India by an Austroasiatic group called the Khasi. who. after cremation. deposit bones in stone boxes called cists.
For the people laid inside the stone. the facts are stark: teeth from 37 individuals. skulls and right femurs from 19. packed with deliberate attention.. For archaeologists, the discovery does more than add a data point.. It pulls one of the region’s most haunting mysteries—what the jars were truly for—into the realm of evidence. where speculation has finally started to give way to understanding.
Laos Plain of Jars Xieng Khouang archaeology stone jars mortuary practice radiocarbon dating Phonsavan ancient trade glass beads South India Mesopotamia DNA testing Austroasiatic
37 people?? Dang.
So they’re saying it was like a storage thing? I swear I saw a thing about “giants brewing” rice wine though, like that’s still the fun story. Either way that jar is huge.
Wait I thought Laos jars were just art or whatever, not bodies. But 37 people’s remains sounds like a modern crime show, not ancient history. Radiocarbon dating too like they know the exact year??
Ancient jar = plain of jars = giants = rice wine… so is this proof the giants were real or what? Cuz they always cut the story short like “we don’t know” then suddenly they do. Also why is it always “mysterious landscape” with bones, feels like clickbait but I guess not.