A research team excavated one of the largest jars, at over 4 feet tall, and found a mixture of human remains.

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Mysterious Jars Sat in a Field for Centuries. Archaeologists Finally Looked Inside One.

In Laos, a landscape filled with giant jars remained a riddle until now.

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Plain of Jars in the province Xieng Khuang in north Lao in southeast Asia
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Mysterious Jars Sat in a Field for Centuries. Archaeologists Finally Looked Inside One.

In Laos, a landscape filled with giant jars remained a riddle until now.

By Tim Newcomb Published: May 21, 2026 8:00 AM EDT




Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

Archaeologists are taking a closer look inside the large stone pots dotting the famed—and mysterious—Plain of Jars in Laos.
A research team excavated one of the largest jars, at over four feet tall, and found a mixture of human remains.
The dating of the 37 different individuals packed into the jars rewrites the history of the sprawling oddity, which comprises a total of 2,100 jars.


In the highlands of central Laos, there are thousands of mysterious stone vessels whose origin and purpose have long been debated by archaeologists. More than 2,100 of these tubular-shaped megalithic stone jars, dating from between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E., dot a large swath of land known as the Plain of Jars in the center of the country’s Xiang Khoang Plateau. There have been lots of theories about their intended purposes, but the consensus has remained that they’re funerary objects of some sort.

However, millions of United States cluster bombs dropped during the Vietnam War still remain undetonated across Laos. So investigating those massive ancient stone jars—and by massive, we’re talking over four feet tall and six feet wide—is extremely tricky. Fortunately, a recent excavation of one of those jars has vastly expanded what we know about them.

In a new study published in Antiquity, a team of researchers managed to excavate one of the largest jars near the Laotian town of Phonsavan. Inside, they found a densely packed deposit of the remains of at least 37 people. Radiocarbon dating showed that the lifetimes of those 37 people spanned 270 years. “We determined that it was an example of secondary internment during the ninth and 12th centuries, C.E., in which human remains were deposited after an initial period of decomposition elsewhere,” Nicholas Skopal, of James Cook University, said in a statement.



..............The more recent dating of the remains also challenges the long-held theory that the ancient jars date from Southeast Asia's Iron Age, repositioning the timeline of the Xieng Khouang Plateau in Laos, “one of Southeast Asia’s most enigmatic archaeological locations.”