Plain of Jars
— — a field of stone vessels older than the questions asked of them.
Not only on a wall.
“A high grassland in Xiangkhouang province, eastern Laos, where thousands of carved stone jars stand in clusters across the hills around Phonsavan. The largest are over two metres tall and weigh several tonnes; the smallest sit at knee height. They were cut and placed between roughly 500 BCE and 500 CE, almost certainly for burial. The same plateau was the most heavily bombed ground in the world during the Secret War, and the cleared paths through each site are still marked with white-and-red stones.
Plain of Jars, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Plain of Jars covers a rolling upland in Xiangkhouang province in northern Laos, roughly 1,000 to 1,200 metres above sea level, with the town of Phonsavan as the usual base. More than ninety jar sites have been recorded across the plateau, holding upwards of two thousand carved stone vessels in sandstone, granite, and limestone. UNESCO inscribed the megalithic jar sites of Xiengkhuang on the World Heritage list in 2019. The jars are now generally dated to the Iron Age, roughly 500 BCE to 500 CE, and are understood to be funerary.
The largest jar, at Site 1 near Ban Ang, stands about three metres tall and is estimated to weigh around six tonnes. The stone for most jars is thought to come from quarries up to ten kilometres away, with no clear evidence of how they were moved. The pioneering survey of the sites was carried out in the 1930s by the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani, who excavated a nearby limestone cave and concluded the jars were used as primary burial vessels.
Phonsavan, the provincial capital, is reached by a 45-minute flight from Vientiane or a hard ten-hour drive across the mountains. Site 1, Site 2, and Site 3 are the three openly visitable clusters within an hour of town and have been cleared of unexploded ordnance left from the 1964 to 1973 US bombing campaign. Visitors must keep to the marked paths between the white-and-red MAG marker stones. The MAG visitor centre in Phonsavan explains the ongoing clearance.