The Plain of Jars has a two-thousand-year hole in the middle of its story. Luminescence dating puts the jars in place between 1240 and 660 BCE, but the human remains buried around them date from the 8th to 13th centuries CE — the people who buried their dead here arrived up to two millennia after the stone was carved, and nobody knows who the carvers were. More than 2,100 jars survive, one to three metres tall and weighing up to ten tonnes, cut mostly from sandstone at quarries kilometres away and somehow dragged into place across more than ninety sites in Xieng Khouang province. Madeleine Colani, the French archaeologist who dug here in the 1930s, found burnt bone and glass beads inside them and argued they were funerary urns; that is still the leading theory, and no writing survives anywhere to confirm it. UNESCO inscribed eleven of the sites in 2019.
Site 1, eight kilometres from Phonsavan, is where most visitors start: 334 jars leaning and tipped across an open field, with a limestone cave at its edge whose roof carries two man-made holes — chimneys, Colani thought, for a crematorium. Come at dawn in the cool months and fog lies thick on the plateau, so the jars surface one by one as it thins. Sites 2 and 3 stand on wooded hills above rice paddy, quieter and usually empty. But the ground here holds a second, far more recent history: Laos is the most heavily bombed country per head in history, Xieng Khouang took the worst of it, and the shallow dips in the grass between the jars are bomb craters. Off the cleared and marked paths, this plateau is still not safe to walk.