HOW did a CANADIAN end up on a quest to SOLVE ONE OF SOUTHEAST ASIA’S GREAT MYSTERIES?
Archeologist Dougald O’reilly leads the effort to answer questions about Laos’s puzzling Plain of Jars
SHAFTS OF SUNLIGHT struggle to penetrate mist hanging over mixed forest on a mountaintop in the northern reaches of the Annamite range in Laos. It’s a cold day in February 2017 and a metal pot of coffee simmers on a fire. Nearby, Canadian archeologist Dougald O’reilly, in a canvas Australian stockman hat and army pants, black puffer jacket and Grateful Dead T-shirt, is crouched in a precisely cut fourby-four-metre trench. At its edge is an oval stone disk roughly one metre across. It’s lying flat near a huge stone “jar.” This is Site 52 of the Plain of Jars, so named for the plateau where the bestknown group of jars, Site 1, is situated, near the city of Phonsavan. From Phonsavan, Site 52 is an hour’s drive on a highway, then another 45 minutes up a precipitous dirt track. Scattered all around this forest floor are some 400 stone vessels, one to three metres tall, some lying on their sides. A number of the jars are broken, with trees growing through them; a few disks, some of them likely lids, can be seen too. The jars are empty except for stagnant rainwater and spiders. O’reilly, 51, is an assistant professor at Canberra’s Australian National University and chief investigator on this three-week field project that’s part of a five-year effort — the first of its scale in some 80 years — to solve the mystery of the jars. “The two most common questions I get are, ‘What were the jars for and how old are they?’” says the darkhaired, blue-eyed Oakville, Ont., native. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.” He’s well positioned to do just that. “Dougald O’reilly is one of the main players in advancing our understanding of Southeast Asian prehistory,” says Charles Higham, an archeologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. “He’s been a success story from the word go.” Higham, who himself has long been considered the “rock star” of archeology in this part of the world, credits his former student with making an exceptional contribution in Cambodia, both in excavating key sites and in his initiatives to protect cultural heritage. (See sidebar, “Heritage Watch: Preserving Cambodia’s Past.”) As for Laos, says Higham, “Dougald has pioneered fieldwork there by opening this major Plain of Jars project.” One of the team’s main goals is to map the sites, and the jars themselves, for the first time with remote sensing and GIS. O’reilly says this is crucial for the Laos government’s bid, now underway, for UNESCO World Heritage status for the jar sites. Such status would benefit Laos, one of the world’s poorest countries, since it boosts tourism and can help preserve the sites. If successful, the government will have O’reilly and his project partner, archeologist Louise Shewan of the University of Melbourne, to thank: the pair approached Laos’s heritage department back in 2012 to propose this research. “The fact that too little was known about the jars had been one of the hurdles they’d been facing in gaining World Heritage status,” says O’reilly. The archeologists got their permission and were awarded a grant from the Australian Research Council, and began work on Site 1 in 2016.
LITTLE IS KNOWN about the megaliths, thought to have been made a couple of thousand years ago. There are some 80 jar sites scattered around northeast Laos,
and a handful in remote eastern India, thousands of kilometres away. Many were quarried a few kilometres from where they sit, further adding to the Stonehenge-like mystery: Weighing as much as 10 metric tons apiece, how did they even get here from the quarries? Were they transported on log rollers, dragged by elephants, or somehow rolled to the sites? O’reilly calls his search for the answers “invigorating.” No major excavation has been done since the 1930s, when famed French archeologist Madeleine Colani first studied these jars in what was then part of French Indochina. Then came civil war starting in the 1940s, and later the Vietnam War, during which the U.S. bombed Laos for a decade. (It’s said Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.) About 30 per cent of the 260 million bombs dropped never detonated, so the unexploded ordinance, or “UXO,” has been a deadly obstacle — not just for archeological work, but for anything from road-building to farming. The British non-profit Mines Advisory Group has been in Laos since the mid-1990s to remedy that. It’s slow, painstaking work, but the group has now cleared UXO from various locations for a total of about 60 square kilometres, indicating cleared areas by embedding the ground with bricks engraved “MAG.” It has helped keep about one million people safe. Site 1 was declared clear about 10 years ago. During their 2016 excavations of the bomb-cratered plateau that’s home to some 300 jars, O’reilly, Shewan and Laotian archeologists found human bones in smaller ceramic vessels buried under- neath flat stone disks beside the jars. The theory is that the jars were for mortuary practice. “The people of perhaps the Iron Age — 2,000 years ago — might have used them to rot their dead, then later transferred the bones to the smaller vessels for burial,” says O’reilly. Archeologists including Colani (whom O’reilly admires so much he named his now four-year-old daughter, Madeleine, after her) and Julie Van Den Bergh, a Belgian who mapped some of the jar sites in the early 2000s, believed this. “But until we get lab results from samples we’ve taken, that remains unproven,” says O’reilly. So far there aren’t really any other plausible theories. (A fanciful one: Some villagers believe the jars were used to store rice wine for a mythical giant.) Back at Site 52 (which had no UXO, only machine-gun shells), eight of O’reilly’s team members have been using pickaxe-like tools called mattocks to dig the trench into the crumbly red soil beside the oval disk. They want to see what’s underneath; O’reilly suspects
‘O’reilly has pioneered fieldwork in Laos by opening this Plain of Jars project ...’ mapping the sites for the first time with remote sensing and GIS.
human bones, as at Site 1. But the disk is thicker than expected — about 25 centimetres — and too heavy to lift without the help of levers. O’reilly walks off into the forest with his machete, cuts a couple of tree limbs and drags them over. As they use the levers to lift the lid, the moment of truth reveals … nothing. They take a few more hours to dig down another third of a metre or so — and still nothing. “Oh, that’s very interesting,” remarks O’reilly dryly, rubbing his chin in faux contemplation. Sure, he’s disappointed, as is the team, but “sometimes you find things, sometimes you don’t,” he says with a shrug. “Even when what you’re hoping for isn’t there, in this case anthropogenic
Bonnie Munday (@bonnie_munday) has written for Canadian Geographic Travel, Reader’s Digest International, Travellife and The Walrus. material, it’s still about gathering information. And you just keep going.”
SO HOW DID a Canadian end up on a quest to solve this mystery of Southeast Asia? O’reilly’s fascination with archeology goes way back; he still has a drawing he made at age five of himself digging with a shovel next to the Sphinx. His parents nurtured the interest. “Dougald used to love it when I told him stories of the Celts in Ireland, heroes like Brian Boru, Cú Chulainn,” says his dad, Joe, in his lilting Irish accent. When Dougald’s parents took him to his mom’s ancestral home of Scotland, they visited a cemetery. “We were standing at the gravestone of someone named Macgregor, I think,” says Joe. “Dougald knew clans were identified by their tartans — and he asked if we could dig up this grave to see what tartan the man was wearing! It was outlandish, but perfectly logical to him.” Joe says his son drifted academically through his teens, and Dougald recalls that when he graduated from Ottawa’s Carleton University at age 21, he felt his career options with a history degree were limited. So he put off job decisions and travelled for a year on a round-the-world ticket with his best mate. In particular, O’reilly was struck by Thailand, and it was on his travels there that his passion for archeology was rekindled, and he decided he’d study that part of the world. “Archeologically, Southeast Asia was poorly understood,” he explains. “I decided to put all my eggs in one basket, and work my tail off to achieve my goal.” He eventually got his BA in classical archeology at Brock University in Ontario, then his master’s and PHD in New Zealand under Charles Higham (O’reilly had been determined to study under the leading authority on Southeast Asian prehistory). During those studies, the pair worked on projects in Cambodia and Thailand. In 2000, after getting his PHD, O’reilly moved to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, where he was a UNESCO lecturer at the Royal University of Fine Arts. It was a time of constant change in Cambodia, a country finally free of the Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for some two million deaths from execution or starvation — mainly in the 1970s, though they were active until the 1990s. “When I was there, there were people from around the world working on important projects such as disarmament, wildlife protection and schools for disadvantaged children,” says O’reilly. In 2010 came a dream job: leading an excavation inside Angkor Wat. “When I was a kid, National Geographic dedicated an issue to Angkor Wat, and I was in awe,” recalls O’reilly. The 12th-century temple, dedicated to the Hindu deity Vishnu, covers 208 hectares and is the world’s largest religious complex. O’reilly led the 2010 excavation after ground-penetrating radar had revealed anomalies indicating another temple underneath. Sure enough, they discovered such remains. It was a major find in the world of archeology when the research was published. O’reilly went on to author the digital book An Interactive Guide to Angkor. Yet, he says, as intimately familiar as he is with Angkor, “every time I drive through its gates I still have a feeling of awe.”
‘The people of the Iron Age might have used the jars to rot their dead, then later transferred the bones to the smaller vessels for burial.’
OVER THREE WEEKS at Site 52, the team never did find bones but, significantly, they found four previously unknown quarry sites. They also tried a new type of testing. In simple terms, says Shewan, stone can’t be dated, “so we took core samples from the bottoms of the jars for ‘optically stimulated luminescence’ testing.” They hope it will reveal when the jar bottoms were last exposed to sunlight — therefore, when they were placed on the ground where they sit. The process of taking those stone samples was tricky, as no light can be present: black lightproof tarps were tented over the extraction site, and O’reilly held a flashlight covered in a red filter while he used a drill to extract the core. The team heads to Assam, India, this year to see how jars there compare to what they’ve found in Laos. Meantime, they can “visit” Laos any time they like from their base in Australia, at the CAVE2 3D facility at Monash University in Melbourne. Drone photos gathered in 2016 have been used to create a virtual Site 1. (They collected drone photos at Site 52 and will soon be able to revisit it in 3D, too.) CAVE2 is the world’s largest virtual reality facility of its kind — no VR goggles required. “We can ‘return’ to our excavations to do things like take measurements and interpret data,” says O’reilly. And thanks to drones, they’ll have a safe way to check out jar sites that may not yet be clear of UXO. “Of course, you can’t excavate without being there, but you can gather a lot of information on site location and the surrounding landscape.” It could be a year until the team has results from soil and other physical samples — including a human tooth — that they gathered at Site 52, and up to two years for the optically stimulated luminescence results. But O’reilly hopes the data will finally provide some answers about these massive megaliths on remote mistshrouded mountaintops. “Archeology,” says O’reilly, “is largely about untangling mysteries, and the Plain of Jars is one of the world’s enigmas.”
‘The fact that too little was known about the jars had been one of the hurdles they’d been facing in gaining World Heritage status’
Get a closer look at the Plain of Jars by watching spectacular drone footage of the site at cangeo.ca/ma18/jars.