Archaeologists found 37 people buried in one giant 'death jar'

Located in northern Laos, the Xieng Khouang Plateau is home to one of the world's most puzzling archaeological sites: the Plain of Jars.

The name comes from the hundreds of stone “jars” scattered around the area. For nearly a century, archaeologists have pondered their purpose, suspecting they were funerary urns, as some had been found with burnt bones and ashes. Now a team of researchers exploring the site has found a hefty, megalithic stone jar containing the remains of at least 37 people—from a toddler to adults—that dates to more than a thousand years ago.

“We were very excited because it was the first time we found non-burnt bones inside a jar,” says Nicholas Skopal, an archaeologist at James Cook University in Australia and lead author of the study, which was published in spring in Antiquity.

The skeletal remains inside the jars were not tossed in randomly, Skopal says, as large bones and skulls were set near the outer edges. The discovery provides further evidence that the mysterious jars were part of a complex funerary process, and it may also explain why other smaller stone pots across the Plain of Jars often lacked human remains.     

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But some archaeologists are skeptical of the team's interpretation of how the stone vessel was used.

"We can't know for sure if the vase was really made with the burial objective in sight," says Kelly Brandão, an archaeologist with the University of São Paulo and Mamirauá Institute at Tefé who was not involved in the work. "This finding alone would be astonishing, but it would be equally astonishing to find out they were made for other uses. The team certainly has a lot of work ahead to answer this question."

A communal crypt?

The giant jar Skopal and his team found, known as “Jar 1,” measures about four feet high and nearly seven feet wide. It took them three field seasons between 2022 and 2024 to fully excavate and retrieve the bones inside. The researchers also found an iron knife, a small copper bell, some stone slabs, shards of earthenware and glass beads inside the vessel. The beads, Skopal adds, “could have been some sort of offering for the deceased, like a necklace or something like that.”

Radiocarbon dates from teeth and bones, combined with a charcoal sample from a nearby trench, indicate that Jar 1 was in use between A.D. 890 and 1160. That suggests the ancient people used it over several generations rather than in a single instance. The chemical signatures of the glass beads, which point to connections with South Asia and the Middle East, hint that the people were also connected to the long‑distance trade routes crisscrossing mainland Southeast Asia at the time.

Skopal has a hypothesis for how the jars were used. He suspects people first used smaller stone jars as primary, individual containers for decomposing the dead. “Once the flesh was removed, bones could be collected and placed as secondary bundles into the larger jar,” he says.

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Jar 1, he adds, may have served as a communal ossuary. People would have gathered the skeletons into curated bundles and placed them into a monumental stone container overlooking the plateau. Or maybe the people removed some bones from inside the giant jar and then put them elsewhere, he adds, because his team found a discrepancy between the number of skulls and large bones and the number of teeth. The teeth suggest there were 37 distinct individuals in the jar, but the skulls and bones account for only between 14 and 19.

“That's a really interesting factor,” Skopal says, “and shows how complex this mortuary ritual is.”     

An unsettled theory

Some scientists not involved with the work say Skopal’s interpretation is plausible. But not all specialists are ready to embrace the death jar label.

Marc Oxenham, a bioarchaeologist with the Australian National University, says the new paper does not provide a full inventory of skeletal elements or a detailed analysis of how the bones degraded and moved around inside the jar.

In his view, the funerary process may have been more mundane, involving just one jar used for centuries as the primary place for disposal. The reason the bones became a disarticulated jumble, he says, is perhaps because the jar was left open to the elements or reopened repeatedly, with weather, animals, and people disturbing earlier burials. Until finer‑grained data are available, Oxenham argues, “both scenarios remain on the table.”

Further west in India, Marco Mitri, an archaeologist at North-Eastern Hill University, has come across mortuary symbols in the Khasi-Jaintia Hills—ancient stone jars among them. These jars, however, sit over cremated bones, suggesting they served more as tomb markers than as containers for the remains themselves. He says that in the present time, families of the Austro‑Asiatic Khasi and Jaintia groups cremate their dead, keep the bones, and later transfer them to “clan cists,” stone structures where the remains of many individuals are gathered during ceremonies that can last more than a week.

To Mitri, the notion of a multi‑generational bone container in ancient Laos seems culturally conceivable. “That is possible, why not?” he says. “Cists here are reused for generations of the same clan,” he says.

Brandão, who works in the Brazilian Amazon, has a similar point of view. She studies the forest's pre-Columbian groups and is currently working on the large funerary urns uncovered last year in the Middle Solimões River region.

While excavations inside these large containers are still underway, other smaller urns found in the past have yielded a few results. Brandão says nine small urns recovered from 2014 to 2018 showed signs of secondary deposition.

“One interesting similarity with this study is that not all bone parts are put there,” she adds. Brandão also recalls having studied a site in Monte Castelo, Rondônia state, which became a cemetery with time, but wasn't originally built to be one.

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These jars from the past, be they in Laos or Brazil or elsewhere, might be telling the same story, according to Brandão. “Many archaeologists understand death rituals as a turning point to what made us humans,” she says.

For Skopal, the next steps are to try to extract and analyze DNA from the remains in hopes of retrieving answers about the individuals buried inside the large jar.

“We have no idea of who these people were and where they lived,” Skopal says. “The problem is getting DNA [at the Plain of Jars] is really hard due to the tropical climate—but fingers crossed!"