The next morning at Site 1, we were among the first visitors of the day, and so I explored the more than 300 stone vessels that spread over the undulating land in silence. Even this place that had seemed remote on the map was not all that hard to reach. It was a far cry from her travels on foot, and I feared that my adventures would somehow always be diminished compared with those of my predecessors. Three of the larger jar sites that Colani surveyed in 1931 are accessible by car, one of them via a paved road. Another is tourism - I was easily able to hire a guide and driver at the front desk of one of the hotels on the dusty main drag, where Route 7 runs through town. THE minivan deposited us in Phonsavan, the modern provincial capital, where rebar from unfinished buildings sprouts above rice paddies and one of the primary local industries is bomb clearance. “At night, with little or no village, it was necessary to sleep in hastily raised shelters made of banana leaves.” On one expedition she set out chasing a tip that there was a single field of 1,000 jars: “Abominable voyage, on tracks that often followed the summits, hardly trodden. Though it is packed with scientific detail and richly informed theory, it was the introduction, where she shares glimpses of her own adventure, that I found most captivating. It is hands down the best guide to the jars - that is, if you don’t mind carrying around a 719-page, two-volume hardcover available only in French. Who was this Frenchwoman who had withstood actual hardship - as opposed to the kind a dose of Dramamine can fix - to solve an ancient riddle?īefore setting out on my trip, I obtained “The Megaliths of Upper Laos,” Colani’s great contribution to archaeological literature. But I had become just as intrigued by Colani herself, the woman who tried to fill in the blanks. Relative to other Iron Age civilizations, the jar makers remain mysterious, and I was attracted to this hole in the historical record. Since then, they have had to tiptoe around the unexploded bomb parts that still litter the landscape from American carpet bombing in the late ’60s, when the United States and Vietnam fought a proxy war there. For decades beginning in the 1940s, the region was ravaged by war archaeologists started to build on her work only in the ’90s. But after many months of fieldwork, Colani suggested convincingly that they were used in funerary rites, intended to hold cremated remains. There are local legends about their origin - one says that a tribe of giants used them as wine chalices to celebrate a great victory. First, she is the source of most of what is known about the jars and their makers. ![]() The tallest jars reach nearly 10 feet high.Ĭolani, who was born in France but spent years conducting archaeological surveys in Southeast Asia, was, in more ways than one, the reason I was here. They are grouped into clusters that range from just a few to hundreds. The Plain of Jars is an area of the Xieng Khouang plateau of Laos scattered with thousands of megalithic stone jars that are about 2,000 years old. It was May, season of the first strong storms it was urgent to get back to the Plain of Jars before the route was cut off.” “The few laborers we had with us ran away one by one without even asking for their wages,” Colani later wrote in her 1935 book, “The Megaliths of Upper Laos.” “Dengue reigned at the site my sister, my Laotian interpreter and some of the faithful laborers took ill. Though Monsieur received Mademoiselle and her crew amiably, troubles awaited them at his camp that far exceeded my own temporary discomfort. That year, an archaeologist named Madeleine Colani took refuge at the road works encampment there, where a Monsieur Ruffet presided over the construction of Route 7, which would run from Hanoi, the capital of French Indochina, to the royal city of Luang Prabang on the Mekong River. The spot where I got carsick, I later learned, was precisely where the unfinished French colonial road had reached its westernmost end in 1932. STUFFED with passengers and piled high with luggage, our minivan careened down a twisting mountain road, descending across northern Laos.
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