Posted on 05/22/2019 10:10:55 PM PDT by ETL
More than 100 giant stone jars, thought to have been used in burial rituals thousands of years ago, have been rediscovered at ancient sites in forests, on hillsides and along mountain ridges in remote central Laos.
The carved stone jars are scattered across miles of the rugged, tiger-haunted Xiangkhouang province, about 200 miles north of Laos' capital, Vientiane, in South Asia. They have been dubbed " jars of the dead " by researchers.
Several human burials, thought to be around 2,500 years old, have been found at some of these sites in Laos, but nothing is known about the people who originally made the jars.
An expedition of archaeologists from Laos and Australia visited the Xiangkhouang region in February and March this year to document known jar sites and to search for new jars-of-the-dead sites and stone quarries.
The new finds show that the mysterious culture that made the stone jars was geographically more widespread than previously thought, said Louise Shewan, an archaeologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and one of the expedition leaders.
The largest and best-known jar site is the famous Plain of Jars, located in relatively open country near the town of Phonsavan. That site contains around 400 carved stone jars, some as tall as 10 feet and weighing more than 10 tons, and the first archaeological investigation of it was made in the 1930s.
But Shewan said that the majority of the jar sites usually contained fewer than 60 carved stone jars, and were found in forested and mountainous terrain surrounding the Plain of Jars, spread over thousands of square miles.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
*ping*
The bodies were buried nearby....almost like these were tombstones. Have to read more to find what they found at the bottom of these collection devices.
How is it that I’ve almost made it to 63 years of life without ever hearing about these “Jars of the Dead”?
It’s enormously morbid and fascinating, in an Anthropological way. The Pharaohs got pyramids, lined with gold and precious stones, while the poor got a big clay jar; one jar for an entire village in many cases.
Supposedly the most heavily bombed place on earth.
“Between 1964 and 1973, the Plain of Jars was heavily bombed by the U.S. Air Force (see Secret War) operating against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao communist forces. The U.S. Air Force dropped more bombs on Laos, primarily the Plain of Jars, than it dropped during the whole of World War II.”
From Wiki
Its just kim-chee, and it wont be ready for another decade, at least!
kim-chee? What is that, some sort of weird crap they eat over there?
Every house has a stone crock in the ground. Anything that is a vegetable stem, peel, husk, etc.... is chopped up and put in the crock. It’s like a continuous fermenting pickle barrel. I first experienced this in rural Japan during an extended stay trip to a project at a factory.
Local legends include a story that the enormous stone jars were made by giants, who used the vessels to brew rice beer to celebrate a victory in war.
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Sounds like the stories of the Easter Island statues. In fact, those jars have a familial resemblance to the Easter Island statues in their style.
Thanks ETL fieldmarshaldj. Laos -- betcha can't embalm just one.
Either that or Dahmer.
What’s the use by date on those jars?
the plain de jars
Laotian kim-chi.
Is that that then-controversial Led Zeppelin album cover?
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