A giant stone jar in Laos holding 37 skeletons may finally solve a century-old mystery

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 sedimentThe 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 content...