{"it":{"id":"ASI-013","kind":"site","sub":"Asia","name":"Plain of Jars","place":"Laos","lat":19.431,"lon":103.153,"date":"Researchers (using optically stimulated luminescence) determined that the jars were put…","mat":"clay;earth;granite;limestone;sandstone","nfacts":7,"tags":["Asia"],"sum":"Thousands of carved stone jars, some weighing several tonnes, lie scattered across the Xiangkhoang Plateau in Laos.","why":"Thousands of stone jars on a Laos plateau, used for funerals by a culture little is known about, with dates that do not agree.","src":[374],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Burials lie around the jars, not inside them. What went inside?","rel":["ASI-010"],"hook":"More than 2,100 stone jars lie across a plateau in Laos. Who carved them, and what went inside?"},"S":{"374":["Wikipedia: Plain of Jars","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_of_Jars"]},"rec":{"id":"ASI-013","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"site chronology","a":"dating (as stated)","v":"nce) determined that the jars were put in place as early as 1240 to 660 BC","u":"","o":"Researchers (using optically stimulated luminescence) determined that the jars were put in place as early as 1240 to 660 BC.","unc":"","by":"per cited source","yr":"","m":"documentary: auto-extracted sentence","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375512965 (tertiary)","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M0833"},{"f":"The jars vary in height and diameter between","a":"height","v":"1","u":"m","o":"REF4 The jars vary in height and diameter between 1 m and 3 m and are all hewn from rock.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375512965 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0834"},{"f":"in height and diameter between 1 m and","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"3","u":"m","o":"REF4 The jars vary in height and diameter between 1 m and 3 m and are all hewn from rock.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375512965 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0835"},{"f":"The jar measuring approximately","a":"height","v":"1.3","u":"metres","o":"The jar, measuring approximately 1.3 metres high and more than 2 metres wide, is the first example in the region to contain undisturbed human remains within the vessel itself.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375512965 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0836"},{"f":"approximately 1 3 metres high and more than","a":"width","v":"2","u":"metres","o":"The jar, measuring approximately 1.3 metres high and more than 2 metres wide, is the first example in the region to contain undisturbed human remains within the vessel itself.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375512965 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0837"},{"f":"Jars range from","a":"height","v":"1-3","u":"meters","o":"* Jars range from 1 to 3 meters in height, with some weighing up to 14 tons.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375512965 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0838"},{"f":"meters in height with some weighing up to","a":"mass","v":"14","u":"tons","o":"* Jars range from 1 to 3 meters in height, with some weighing up to 14 tons.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375512965 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0839"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"Five rock types have been identified: sandstone, granite, conglomerate, limestone and breccia.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965"},{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"Five rock types have been identified: sandstone, granite, conglomerate, limestone and breccia.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965"},{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"Five rock types have been identified: sandstone, granite, conglomerate, limestone and breccia.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"Researchers (using optically stimulated luminescence) determined that the jars were put in place as early as 1240 to 660 BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1587","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"19.4311","lon":"103.1525","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0019 deg (~0.21 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1564547715"},"src":[{"id":"S0366","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plain_of_Jars&oldid=1375512965"},{"id":"S0577","t":"Wikipedia: Plain of Jars","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_of_Jars"},{"id":"VASI-013-3","t":"Megalithic Jar Sites in Xiengkhuang – Plain of Jars - UNESCO World Heritage Centre","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1587/"},{"id":"VASI-013-4","t":"Dating the megalithic culture of laos: Radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence and U/Pb zircon results - PMC","u":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7946304/"}],"sum":"On a hillside called Phoukeng, in the uplands of northern Laos, the work simply stops. Across about twenty hectares of sandstone lie stone jars at every stage of their making. Here is a rough block, barely shaped. There is a cylinder roughed out but never hollowed. Further on lies a vessel almost finished, its mouth opened, left where it was cut. It looks as though the carvers set down their tools one afternoon and walked away. Eight kilometres from this quarry, scattered over the ridges of a grassy plateau, stand the jars they did finish. There are more than two thousand of them, and nobody knows for certain what they were made to hold.\n\nThis is the Plain of Jars, in Xiengkhuang province, Laos. UNESCO counts more than 2,100 tube-shaped stone jars across the region, carved in the Iron Age and used, it says, in funeral practices. When the area was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2019, the protected property took in 15 parts holding 1,325 jars, along with stone discs that may have been lids, burials, grave markers, quarries and workshops. The jars range from about one to three metres tall, and some weigh up to 14 tonnes by one estimate, more than 30 by others. They stand alone or in great gatherings; some groups number more than 400.\n\nThe plain itself is a natural grassland of about 80 square kilometres, lying some 1,100 metres above sea level and ringed by forested mountains. Its soils are too poor to carry forest, so it stays open, a wide stage under the sky. Yet most of the jar sites are not on the flat at all. They sit on ridges, saddles and hill slopes around it, as if placed to be seen or to see. UNESCO notes that the plateau lay at a crossroads between two great Iron Age worlds of Southeast Asia, the lowlands of the Mun and Mekong rivers and the region of the Red River and the Gulf of Tonkin, and that the jar sites seem to follow overland routes. The jars may mark the roads of trade.\n\nWho made them? UNESCO says little is known of the Iron Age culture responsible. Western scholars heard of the jars in the late 1800s, but serious study began only in the 1930s with the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani of the French School of the Far East. She dug at Site 1, found glass and carnelian beads, pottery, and iron and bronze tools among the jars, and dated them to the Southeast Asian Iron Age, roughly 500 BC to AD 500. She also reported human remains and beads inside some of the jars, and from that the funeral reading took root.\n\nThen war came to the plain. The region is still littered with unexploded ordnance, bombs and shells left from conflict. Of more than a hundred known jar sites, fewer than one in ten had been cleared for digging, and bombing has damaged some of the jars themselves. UNESCO says the components of the World Heritage property have now been cleared, but for decades the buried ordnance kept archaeologists away from most of the plateau.\n\nWhen researchers finally returned, they faced a basic problem. A stone jar contains no carbon, so it cannot be radiocarbon dated directly. A team led by Louise Shewan of the University of Melbourne used three methods instead, and published the results in 2021. Radiocarbon dated charcoal and bone found around the jars. Optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL, dated the soil beneath them. Grains of quartz store energy from natural radiation while they are buried, and sunlight wipes that store clean, so measuring the stored energy reveals when the soil was last exposed to light, which is to say when a jar was set down on top of it. The third method treated stone like a fingerprint. Tiny zircon crystals in sandstone carry their own uranium-lead age, and the zircons from a jar at Site 1 matched the rock at Phoukeng. That pointed to the abandoned quarry as the likely source, though the authors note similar sandstone may exist elsewhere.\n\nThe dates broke the old timeline open. At Site 2, the OSL results placed the jars between 1240 and 660 BC, centuries earlier than Colani's Iron Age. Human bone around the jars at Site 1 dated mostly to about AD 732 to 944, and the latest to AD 1043 to 1210. One skull fragment from earlier digs came out as early as 2282 to 1265 BC. Even within the study the dates pull against one another: one charcoal sample from under a jar at Site 1 fell in the 12th or 13th century AD, though the authors warn that a nearby burial may have disturbed it. UNESCO, for its part, still dates the sites from 500 BC to AD 500, possibly to AD 800.\n\nThe excavators found three ways of treating the dead at Site 1: whole bodies laid in the ground, bundles of bones reburied after the flesh had gone, and bones placed in pottery jars. Of at least eighteen people found there, more than 60 per cent were children under fifteen. The researchers read the whole pattern as long use. The sites kept their ritual importance from the time the jars were placed until historic times, and people came back to bury their dead beside the stones for perhaps two thousand years.\n\nThat is the mainstream picture, and it is a careful one. UNESCO calls the jars funerary and links them to social rank. The excavators confirm that the sites are bound up with burial. But they say something else too. The jars' original purpose, they write, \"remains a mystery\". A funeral use has not been confirmed by dating human remains found inside a jar. The burials lie around the jars, not in them.\n\nSo consider the strangeness of it. If the Site 2 dates hold, the jars were already old, perhaps more than a thousand years old, when most of the dead whose bones have been dated were laid beside them. The later people did not carve them. They inherited them. They came to a hilltop crowded with great stone vessels made by someone long gone, and they chose to bury their children there.\n\nAnd there is the plain physical puzzle that no one has solved. How were jars weighing many tonnes carried eight kilometres from Phoukeng across rolling ground, uphill onto ridges and saddles? The authors think it needed a large workforce, but how that workforce was organised, fed and directed is unknown.\n\nAt Phoukeng the unfinished jars still lie in the grass, exactly where their carvers left them. Whatever the makers meant to pour, place or keep inside the finished ones went with them. If the jars were ancient even to the people who buried their dead beside them, what did those later mourners believe the stones were, and who did they think had made them?","qs":["Burials lie around the jars, not inside them. What went inside?","One date puts the jars centuries earlier than another. How should we handle dates that disagree?","Some jars stand up to 3 m tall. How would you carve and move one?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Plainofjars_2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plainofjars_2.jpg","title":"Plainofjars 2.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.5","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5","by":"Unknown","cap":"","alt":"Plain of Jars"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Laos_2540_DxO.jpg/1280px-20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Laos_2540_DxO.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Laos_2540_DxO.jpg","title":"20171115 Plain of Jars Laos 2540 DxO.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Jakub Hałun","cap":"Plain of Jars - archaeological site number 1"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Laos_2558_DxO.jpg/1280px-20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Laos_2558_DxO.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Laos_2558_DxO.jpg","title":"20171115 Plain of Jars Laos 2558 DxO.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Jakub Hałun","cap":"Plain of Jars - archaeological site number 1"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Site_1_Laos_2521_DxO.jpg/1280px-20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Site_1_Laos_2521_DxO.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20171115_Plain_of_Jars_Site_1_Laos_2521_DxO.jpg","title":"20171115 Plain of Jars Site 1 Laos 2521 DxO.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Jakub Hałun","cap":"Plain of Jars - archaeological site number 1"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Plainofjars_1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plainofjars_1.jpg","title":"Plainofjars 1.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.5","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5","by":"Unknown","cap":"","alt":"Plain of Jars"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"14","u":"t","h":"Heaviest stone jars; jars stand 1–3 m tall","s":[116]},{"v":"Clay","h":"Made of: Clay, earth, granite, limestone, sandstone","s":[116]}],"hs":{"116":["Wikipedia: Plain of Jars (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_of_Jars"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/ASI-013.webp","w":1186,"h":858,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Plainofjars_2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}