A giant stone jar in Laos holding 37 skeletons may finally solve a century-old mystery | World News
For nearly a century, archaeologists have puzzled over thousands of giant stone jars scattered across the highlands of Laos. Carved from solid rock and weighing several tons each, they stand in clusters across the landscape, yet almost all of them have turned up empty, leaving their original purpose almost impossible to determine. That has finally changed. When researchers excavated the interior of one of the largest known jars, they found it packed with the bones of dozens of people, offering the clearest evidence yet that at least some of these mysterious vessels served as communal burial sites.
A dig that uncovered bone rather than sediment
The excavation took place at a site known as Site 75 in Xieng Khouang province, roughly 43 miles northeast of the town of Phonsavan, home to one of the largest stone jars ever recorded in the region, measuring nearly seven feet across at the base. According to the study titled Death in a jar: a new mortuary tradition at the Plain of Jars, Lao PDR, published in the journal Antiquity, archaeologist Nicholas Skopal of James Cook University in Australia and his colleagues spent three separate digging seasons carefully clearing out the jar’s contents. What they found inside was not soil or grain, but bone, tightly packed and in considerable quantity, along with an iron knife, a small copper bell, broken pottery and a scatter of glass beads.
A century-old puzzle across the Laotian plateau
The jars first drew serious scientific attention in the 1930s, when French archaeologist Madeleine Colani surveyed the region and documented them by the hundreds. More than 120 separate jar sites are known across the plateau today. Early visitors to the region guessed the jars may have stored food or water, while later researchers increasingly suspected a connection to the dead, based on scorched bone and teeth that had already turned up in a handful of jars at other sites, along with earlier research linking the wider area to secondary burial, a practice in which a body is handled in more than one stage rather than being buried once and left undisturbed.
Piecing together at least 37 individuals
Sorting through the tangled remains inside the jar proved to be slow, careful work. The research team counted repeated body parts to estimate how many individuals were present, and an analysis of the teeth produced the highest minimum count, at least 37 separate people. Their ages spanned nearly the full range of human life, from children as young as roughly eighteen months old through to teenagers and adults, a spread suggesting that entire communities, rather than a select few individuals, ended up buried inside this single jar. Skulls had been deliberately gathered around the jar’s edges, with bundles of long bones arranged nearby, an arrangement the researchers say could not have occurred naturally and instead points to careful, intentional placement by the people responsible for the burials.
What the condition of the bones reveals
The physical state of the bones offers further clues about the process behind these burials. The remains were dry and disconnected, and notably missing many of the small, fragile bones that typically hold a fresh body together, suggesting the dead had been left to decompose elsewhere before being transferred into the jar. Radiocarbon dating of the bones points to a strikingly long period of use, possibly stretching across roughly 270 years, indicating the jar likely filled gradually over multiple generations rather than during a single burial event. A cluster of smaller jars stands nearby and, curiously, contained no human remains at all, leading researchers to suggest these smaller vessels may have first held bodies as they decomposed, before the cleaned bones were eventually transferred to the larger jar.
Teeth that reveal identity, health and trade
Some of the teeth recovered from the jar carried a deliberate mark left by the living, a practice known as tooth ablation, in which specific front teeth are intentionally removed, a custom documented across mainland Southeast Asia during this era and believed to signal identity or group belonging. Cavities among the teeth appeared at a modest rate broadly consistent with other sites from the same period, suggesting a way of life shared more widely across the region. The glass beads recovered from the jar told an even more striking story; chemical analysis traced their origins to glass production in South Asia, with a couple of beads linked to Mesopotamia and one possibly originating from southern China or northern Vietnam, indicating the highlands of Laos were connected to trade routes stretching across entire oceans rather than being isolated from the wider ancient world. Most of the beads date to a window between roughly AD 900 and 1200, closely matching the dates drawn from the bones themselves.
Rethinking thousands of empty jars across the landscape
Until this excavation, no one had found a large group of individuals spanning multiple ages and generations buried together inside a single one of these stone jars, making Jar 1 the first confirmed discovery of its kind and reshaping how the entire landscape of jars may need to be interpreted. Researchers now suggest that the thousands of empty jars scattered across the region may not represent unfinished or looted vessels after all, but could instead have once held the dead, their contents having long since decayed, been removed, or been carried away by grieving families over the centuries. Researchers at the Australian National University are now examining the recovered bones in finer detail and extracting ancient DNA from them, work that researchers hope could eventually reveal who these people were and how they were related to one another, offering a clearer picture of the communities that once gathered around this jar over nearly three centuries.
