© ANUThe mystery deepens: some of the newly discovered “death jars” strewn across a mountain forest in Laos.
The so-called "death jars" of Laos could be more widespread than previously thought.Australian archaeologists and Lao Government officials have reported discovering 15 new sites containing 137 of the massive stone jars, which are believed to be around 1000 years old.
Experts believe the jars are related to disposal of the dead, but nothing is known for sure about their original purpose or the people who brought them there.
"These new sites have really only been visited by the occasional tiger hunter," says ANU's Nicholas Skopal. "Now we've rediscovered them, we're hoping to build a clear picture about this culture and how it disposed of its dead."
What's intriguing, says Skopal's colleague Dougald O'Reilly, is that there are no signs of occupation in the surrounding area, suggesting the jars were transported over a distance.
"It's apparent the jars, some weighing several tonnes, were carved in quarries, and somehow transported, often several kilometres to their present locations," he says. "But why these sites were chosen as the final resting place for the jars is still a mystery."
The recent excavations revealed carved discs which are most likely burial markers placed around the jars. The imagery includes concentric circles, pommels, human figures and creatures.
Curiously, the decorated side of each disc was buried face down.
"Decorative carving is relatively rare at the jar sites and we don't know why some discs have animal imagery and others have geometric designs," O'Reilly says.
Typical iron-age artefacts were found with the burials - decorative ceramics, glass beads, iron tools, discs worn in the ears and spindle whorls for cloth making. However, it was one particular find piqued the researchers' interest.
"Curiously we also found many miniature jars, which look just like the giant jars themselves but made of clay, so we'd love to know why these people represented the same jars in which they placed their dead, in miniature to be buried with their dead," say O'Reilly.
"We've seen similar megalithic jars in Assam in India and in Sulawesi in Indonesia, so we'd like to investigate possible connections in pre-history between these disparate regions."
More than 90 jar sites have been identified over the years in the "
Plain of Jars" in Xieng Khouang Province in central Laos. The first scientific study of them was carried out in the 1930s by French archaeologist
Madeleine Colani.
Perhaps these "jars" are cast off from an intense plasma from the sky interacting with the ground likened to a welding process from which they are flung. Perhaps also, those people who first found them made replicas of clay to mimic the originals when they placed their dead inside of them; seems plausible to me. I mean, seriously ... who is going to create a "Jar" of several tonnes in a distant (and imaginary) quarry and then relocate them simply to "dispose" of the dead? Wouldn't a normal person just burn the corpses or, heavens forbid, bury them ? There are no moulds or plugs because they weren't castings so if they were indeed created by intelligent hands then perhaps those "jars" belonged to giants that could pick them up with one hand and drink from them (apparently they didn't like handles). The Hindu Vedas AND the Christian Bible speak of giant men some 60 feet tall (we were all told of David and Goliath and Jack and the Beanstalk in our little western classrooms) so perhaps those stories are actually true and here is the proof (Albeit without the machines and tools from which they were apparently fabricated). I can't believe that researchers in this day and age clutch at such narrow ideals in order to make something so enigmatic fit into their limited world view but I guess we can all thank the Smithsonian (sun god) Institute (1846) and the Supreme Council of Antiquities or MSA (1859) for doing such a swell job of covering up the true history of mankind resulting in such an intellectually myopic understanding of the world that our esteemed researchers can't even come up with semi-plausible explanations for riddles such as these.
I don't even know why I waste my time... but I do.