An ancient site in Laos, known as the Plain of Jars, is finally beginning to give up its secrets, as the first major excavation effort since the 1930s digs into its mysteries.
Strewn over hundreds of square miles in central Laos, thousands of ceramic jars ranging from three to nine feet in height pepper the landscape, scattered in clusters of anywhere between one and 400 individual pieces.
[...] And while the specific function of these jars is still to be determined, those involved in the most recent work have their theories.
One such theory is that the pots were actually used for decomposition, as lead researcher Dougald O'Reilly of Australian National University in Canberra explained in a statement.
The professor hypothesized that once the process was complete, the bones would then be buried nearby. But whatever the details, he is now convinced that the jars "were used for the disposal of the dead."
Wikipedia says, "[Grave sites] are one of the chief sources of information on prehistoric cultures, and numerous archaeological cultures are defined by their burial customs."
What does it say about ancient cultures in Laos that they put their dead in big stone jars?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:05PM
Don't know, but I am sure they will make up loads of nonsense like they always do, publish them as "research" and argue about them like nerds do about star wars.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Gaaark on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:23PM
They should put Star Wars in one of them thar jar-jars, because the franchise died loooooooonnnngggg ago.
(Is there really an argument about this fact?)
(ridiculous smiley emoji inserted here... but really a lot fricking bigger than the old ridiculous smiley emoji (we're talking, like, planet sized here), and there would be Han Solo and Chewy emojis as well, except the Han Solo emoji died, and the Chewy emoji is suuuuuuuch a f*cking wimp!!!!!! now...
...the new bad guy emoji went away crying with my box of Kleenex....)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Sunday April 10 2016, @09:01PM
"What does it say about ancient cultures in Laos that they put their dead in big stone jars?"
that they invented canning ? ? ?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Francis on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:19PM
They made them and left them strewn about the country to confound the white man.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:24PM
That's where Java goes to die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @05:22PM
Or another whole meaning to being potted?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @06:25PM
LOL, you've got to love all the SJW with no sense of humor or signs of intelligence doing a -1 on an obvious joke.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday April 10 2016, @04:59PM
This "joke" fails entirely, because it is not funny.
The intention in its telling is not to amuse. Any possible wit is entirely subordinated to smugness and gratuitous identification for those of like mind. Such feints at humor cannot do other than fail, because delivered as a joke, it is intentionally insincere.
That is the typical kind of joke that "conservatives" make. They tend not to be self-aware or self-deprecating enough to contain actual humor. This stance is sympathetically disarming and helps the audience of a joke lower their guard. Without this quality, any joke had better be damn clever, or present something contrary to the expected, to be funny.
Conservative humor always misses the point. It most often states the obvious and agreeable to it's intended audience, with the implicit message "isn't it laughable that this kind of thing you dislike exists?" It's not funny because the base motivation is anger - and for humor to work from anger, it must most often be combined with some kind of insight, not just a simple doctrine or judgement. Examples of this are notably, George Carlin and Richard Pryor.
Here's a way to have told a reasonably funny, conservative joke about this story:
"What does it say about ancient cultures in Laos that they put their dead in big stone jars? Well, archaeologists supect one of the earliest examples of a strong potter's union."
Ta bump!
I'll be here all night.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @02:55PM
So in other words, you've got a huge stick up the ass.
Just because you haven't got a sense of humor, doesn't mean that the rest of us are humor impaired. It's a little bit ironic that the guy behaving like a smug jackass is calling somebody else smug because of imagined intents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @05:29PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2016, @08:32PM
They were making kimchi.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:46PM
"How's your Momma doing these days, Junior?"
"Momma passed away last year."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Cancer?"
"No, it was one of those Anne Urism things. She went to bed feeling fine, and she was stiff as a board in the morning."
"Did you have a decent funeral for her?"
"Well, of course. We took her out on the plains and pickled her, like any decent folk do."
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Saturday April 09 2016, @05:09PM
What does it say about ancient cultures in Laos that they put their dead in big stone jars?
That they had different funeral traditions than other cultures we know of.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday April 09 2016, @08:34PM
And at a stroke, the entire discipline of Egyptology was rendered null and void. Scads of wrinkled old men with long gray beards emerged from the crypts where they had been struggling to decipher the hieroglyphs incised on the lids of sarcophagi, and blinked in the warm afternoon sun. Professors Smythe and St. John settled down at a nearby ashlar to play a round of cribbage. Professor Macyntyre collapsed where she stood and sobbed uncontrollably into her tartan handkerchief. Jean Marie de la Roche wandered off calling, "Du vin! Du vin!" Professor Wembley gibbered and gesticulated, having been driven round the twist at the echoing announcement that he had squandered 60 years of his life to learn that Ancient Egyptians had merely had, "a different funeral tradition..."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Sunday April 10 2016, @06:27AM
If I remember correctly their current funeral traditions are very strange by Western standards. They burry their deceased in what amounts to a compost pile for one year, letting the soft bits decompose, then dig the bones up, clean them with pressurized water and box them up to take them home! Presumably the bones are placed into some sort of family shrine back at their residence.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by devlux on Saturday April 09 2016, @07:22PM
Assuming that these are composting jars for human remains, the most logical answer to my mind is this...
They believed in reincarnation.
When we come into this world we start out in an earthen jar (people are mostly made of dirt and water).
When we come back into this world we repeat the process. Doesn't it make sense that to get to the next level you need to go back into the womb?
It makes perfect sense to me to imagine that the ceremonial death practices of a society that claims to believe in rebirth would incorporate elements such as a womb into it's funerary rites. Whether it's reincarnation, moving to the next plane or something like an Elysian field.
More sense actually than floating around on a cloud and playing a harp.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Geotti on Saturday April 09 2016, @07:31PM
What does it say about ancient cultures in Laos that they put their dead in big stone jars?
That they were smart enough not to contaminate their groundwater.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @08:18PM
Some people not smart yet.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-babies-idUSDEL6643420070624 [reuters.com]
Dead Babies in the drink.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 09 2016, @08:52PM
Ok this is hilarious, how the hell did it get modded interesting?
Can we please get a +5 ROFLMAO on the OP???
Heck we can't even get modern countries like the USA to not contaminate their ground water :)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday April 09 2016, @11:11PM
Rich Jews would dig up a hill side and lay their kin's corpses on a flat stone bed. A year later, they would collect the bones and stick them in a jar and rack 'em up on a shelf in the cave. Richer Jews would use stone carved boxes called γλωσσόϰομος \ גלוסקמאות and the richest would use a full body sized stone casket similar to a sarcophagus and referred as such by some contemporary archeologists.
Around Jesus time, people started noticing the bones would turn to dust after a few centuries. They also worried about no being rich enough to afford this or that people would disturb their bones... That's what the whole Heavenly Kingdom thing was about for the people of the time. A way to circumvent Ezekiel 37:1-14 .
There's a whole lot of misconceptions and misinterpretations in Christianity over this sort of things because country priests and even better educated priests didn't know about these sorts of things. About 50 years after the printing press was invented, academic circulation of what was previously only known to Jewish Rabbis made it clear just how much of Catholicism is a result of misinformation... While there are a lot of economic and political factors, these sort of revelations were what gave academic legitimacy to the likes of Martin Luther to leave Catholicism.
Regardless, the practice was picked up from the Egyptians, but everyone around the Mediterranean used to do this sort of things. Rome and Greece included. Separately, some English and Celtics developed similar practices with their burial hills.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by VanderDecken on Saturday April 09 2016, @11:14PM
Maybe they read Niven's Inferno and figured a bunch of people were fit for purgatory.
The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2016, @12:40AM