The Plain of Jars
More than 2,100 stone jars stand in groups across the Xiangkhouang plateau, cut between about 500 BCE and 500 CE by people who left them and little else. The ground around them holds American cluster munitions from the war in Laos, so the cleared ground is marked with paired red and white posts and you walk on the white side of the line.
Field Guide Entry
The jars
They are cut from sandstone, granite, and conglomerate, the largest taller than a person, and they stand in clusters of a few dozen to a few hundred. Some have lids, most do not. Around and under them archaeologists have found human remains, burial goods, stone discs, and quarry sites where jars sit unfinished where they cracked.
The reading most of the evidence supports is funerary: the jars as part of a practice of secondary burial, where remains were placed, exposed, and later interred nearby. That accounts for the bones without accounting for the scale, the quarrying and hauling, or why this plateau.
What nobody has
There is no writing. No inhabited settlement has been tied to the jar fields in a way that explains them, and the culture that made them is known mostly through the jars themselves. Madeleine Colani's survey in the 1930s remains the foundation of the archaeology, and work has resumed only in recent decades.
The other thing in the ground
Between 1964 and 1973 American aircraft dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos, much of it here, and a large share of the cluster submunitions failed to detonate. The jars were bombed and are pocked with it, and the land around them killed farmers for decades afterward.
Clearance by the Mines Advisory Group made the main sites safe to walk, and UNESCO listed the jars in 2019 as the Megalithic Jar Sites in Xiengkhuang, a serial property of 15 components. The clearance is the reason visitors are here at all, and the markers that show its limit are the most conspicuous modern thing on the site.
Visiting Information
Site 1 at Ban Ang is the largest and closest to Phonsavan, with more than 250 jars and made paths, and Sites 2 and 3 are quieter and set in farmland and pine. Entry runs about 35,000 kip at Site 1 and 30,000 at the others, and reported prices vary, so carry small notes.
Walk between the white markers. The paired red and white posts set by clearance teams mark what has been cleared and what has not, red facing the uncleared side, and the rule is simple enough to keep: stay on the white side and on the paths, and do not pick anything up.
Phonsavan is the base for all of it, reachable by road from Luang Prabang or Vientiane or by a short flight, and guides and tuk-tuks in town run the circuit of sites. Mornings are cooler and the light is better across the jar fields. The town also has two visitor centers on the bombing and the clearance work, which is the context the jars now sit inside.
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