Laos – Lee Duigon

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Back in the Sixties, when every day was war in Indochina, every now and then you’d hear something about a “Plain of Jars” in Laos. I always wondered “What’s that?”, but the nooze reports never bothered to explain it.

So it’s still a bit of a mystery today. Just like it’s a mystery where the deuce my link went. Ah, there it is.

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The plain is covered with these great big stone jars, which tend to contain human bones and grave goods. Archaeologists guess they date from around 500 B.C. to 500 A.D., but that’s just a good guess. It’s hard to study a place full of unexploded ordnance waiting to go off and blow an archaeologist to kingdom come.

I wonder what’ll be left of our alleged civilization, fifteen hundred years from now. What will people say about us?

“Oh–them!”

Imagine several square miles of territory peppered with unexploded bombs and containing uncounted thousands of prehistoric stone jars. This is the Plain of Jars, in Laos. In the picture, the little girls have climbed on top of one of the biggest jars.

I first heard of this place in the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was spilling over into Laos. “Jars?” I wondered. What could they be talking about?

Because the region is difficult to get to, and because it’s not safe to do archeological work on a site full of live ordnance just waiting to go off, there’s not a lot that can be said with certainty about the Plain of Jars. Archeologists date them from circa 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. The jars are carved from stone, mostly sandstone. They generally contain ashes, dirt, teeth, bone scraps, and small grave goods. They are apparently connected with funeral practices featuring cremation. Hard to be sure: we are short on written records.

So whose jars were they? Who were the people that carved them and put them there, and what happened to them? What kind of civilization did they have?

If we, the Western world, don’t get our act together, someday people will be asking those questions about us.