Major wars have been fought on the plains around Phonsavan over the centuries, as both Lao, Siamese and Vietnamese armies attempted to win control of them. In the nineteenth century, Chinese bandits further pillaged the plains so that, by the time French archaeologist, Madeleine Colani, arrived in the mid-1930s, almost all that remained of the ancient civilization of the plains were the assemblies of huge stone jars aligned above the plain.
Colani claimed to have discovered beads, bronzes and other artifacts that led her to believe that the jars were funerary urns, dating back 2000 years - an opinion that is held by many researchers today. However, Colani could not shed any light on how the huge jars, carved from non-indigenous limestone, had been transported to the plains - or why so many remained, despite centuries of war. Another mystery surrounds the artifacts Colani found at the site, for they have all since vanished...In northern India and Southern Indonesia there are reported to be similar types of jars.The jars themselves, weighing over three tons each, are carved out of both limestone and sandstone. Some are as tall as two meters and are over a meter in diameter.
An expansion on the funeral theory is that the jars were used as fermentation vessels for the bodies of the deceased. Upon passing on to the spirit world, the body was placed into a jar and left to rot until only the skeleton remained. The accompanying stench of this process might explain why the jars are located on hill tops as compared to the valleys where the villages were. The skeletal remains were then supposed to have been cremated and buried ceremoniously at an offsite location. These mortuary practices of both cremation and secondary burial suggest the sophistication of thought and belief of this ancient civilization. To further this theory, at site 1 there is a cave is located nearby, with carved out chimneys to create a draft for kilns where human bones and ash have been discovered.
Another completely different theory has recently been proposed under which the jars were used for metallurgy rather than fu real practices--who knows?
We went with our private tour guide Iko, who is from the Hmong tribe, and saw jar sites I, 2, and 3, as well as the old town of Muang Khoun, where we saw two old stupas that had been pillaged by Chinese bandits, a French hospital in ruins, and the local Buddhist temple destroyed by American bombs. This province's location along the border with Viet Nam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply line to the south for the Communist forces condemned it to being bombed with more tons of ordnance than any other country in history. The Vietnam War is still a real factor here, with unexploded bombs throughout the countryside, and bomb craters next to ancient stone jars, in some areas the craters now being filled with water and used as fish farms. The people do not seem to hold this against us as Americans, and are quite friendly. A major element of the population are Hmong tribesmen, who mostly fought against the North Vietnamese as a "secret army" of 30,000 supported by the CIA. Many Hmong were given asylum in California and Minnesota after the war, and our guide said that some of the men return to Laos in their old age to buy a young bride "very cheap" - about $2,000. Some older Hmong ladies return to Lao to find a young husband, which provides the man with a chance to go to the US, and financial security, but at the cost of a broken heart, says Iko.
We finished our tour at 4:30pm, had a nice dinner with wine at Bamboozled ($19) which is run by a Scot married to a Lao lady, and retired to read our novels in bed.
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