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Safeguarding the Plain of Jars:
Megaliths and Unexploded Ordnance in the
Lao People's Democratic Republic
Journal of GIS in Archaeology, Volume I
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J-9078
Safeguarding the Plain of Jars:
Megaliths and Unexploded
Ordnance in the Lao People's
Democratic Republic
Journal of GIS in Archaeology, Volume I
Contents Page
Historic Context—The Plain of Jars .................................................... 92
Contemporary Context ......................................................................... 95
The Project ........................................................................................... 97
Documentation Methodology............................................................... 98
Level 1 Documentation—Cultural Landscape Basemaps.................... 98
Reconnaissance Survey of the Cultural Resource of
Xieng Khouang Province ............................................................... 99
Level 2 Documentation—Site Plans .................................................... 100
Conclusion............................................................................................ 101
Journal of GIS in Archaeology, Volume I—April 2003 91
J-9078
Safeguarding the Plain of Jars:
Megaliths and Unexploded
Ordnance in the Lao People's
Democratic Republic
Paul Box
UNESCO GIS Consultant
Historic Context—
The Plain of Jars
Throughout the Xieng Khouang plateau in north-central Lao People's
Democratic Republic thousands of stone jars, varying in height from one
to more than three meters, lie in clusters on prominent hills. Due to the
presence of these enigmatic jars, the area has become known as the Plain
of Jars. Although local oral legends state that the jars are enormous wine
vessels used to celebrate a great victory 1,500 years ago, archaeological
evidence suggests that the jars are in fact funerary urns carved by a Bronze
Age people around 2,000 years ago.
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Safeguarding the Plain of Jars: Megaliths and Unexploded
Ordnance in the Lao People's Democratic Republic
J-9078
Figure 1
Stone burial jars at jar field 2, Lat Sen (photo credits: author)
During the 1930s, Madelaine Colani conducted archaeological research at the Plain of
Jars, the results of which were published in 1935.1 The excavation of a cave at the Bang
Ang site (jar field site 1), close to present-day Phonsavanne Town, yielded burnt bones
and a quantity of ash, which Colani interpreted as evidence of a crematorium. This,
together with bronze and iron artifacts, carnelian beads and cowry shells excavated at
other jar field sites and interpreted as grave goods, led Colani to the conclusion that the
jars were in fact mortuary vessels. More recent excavations by Thongsa
Sayavongkhamdy of the Ministry of Information and Culture have revealed in-ground
burials, which add weight to Colani's hypothesis.
Evidence of burial practices similar to the burials at the Plain of Jars can be found along
the coast of Viet Nam, south of the present-day city of Danang and in the North Cachar
Hills in northeast India. All of these sites date to roughly the same period, ca 500 B.C.–
1 Colani, M. Megalithes Du Haut-Lao, Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, Paris, 1935.
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Safeguarding the Plain of Jars: Megaliths and Unexploded
Ordnance in the Lao People's Democratic Republic
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500 A.D. Together, they form a mosaic of locales inhabited by a Bronze Age culture that
were linked by trading routes2 (please see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Location of the Plain of Jars site in relation to related
archaeological sites in northeast India and central Viet Nam
Colani's explanation for the apparently dense Bronze Age occupation of the Plain of Jars
was that the Xieng Khouang plateau was a strategic central location for controlling
trading routes from eastern India, southern China, and north-central Viet Nam. Colani
further suggested that salt, available in the Laotian uplands, and still used today to make
fermented fish paste, a dietary staple of the region, may have provided the dwellers of the
Plain of Jars with a stable resource base and the capital to procure exotic imported
goods.3
The Plain of Jars site is therefore an extremely important site that has great potential for
increasing our understanding of the protohistory of Southeast Asia in the formative
2 UNESCO, Safeguarding the Plain of Jars: Request for Technical Assistance. UNESCO
internal document, Bangkok, 1999.
3 Ibid.
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Ordnance in the Lao People's Democratic Republic
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period of 500 B.C. to 500 A.D., when movement of peoples and ideas across the Indo-
Chinese peninsula from India to China opened the area to international commerce.
Contemporary
Context
Today, the Xieng Khouang plateau is of little agricultural value, largely comprising
grassy or shrub-covered limestone and sandstone hills, ranging from 900 to 1,100 meters
above sea level, supporting subsistence agriculture.
During the Viet Nam War, American forces dropped more than two million tons of
bombs on Laos. The Plain of Jars, which was of strategic military importance during the
Viet Nam War, suffered particularly heavy aerial bombardment and intense ground
battles, during which 85 percent of the villages in the province were bombed.4 It is
estimated that 300,000 hectares, or 25 percent of the total land area of the province, is
now contaminated by unexploded ordnance (UXO), which represents a very real threat to
personal safety and a serious impediment to the socioeconomic development of the
region.5 People in Xieng Khouang Province have become used to handling and defusing
unexploded ordnance, which are either sold for scrap metal or used for a wide range of
everyday products including containers, boats, and fence posts. More recently, a market
for selling defused UXO to tourists has developed.
4 Handicap International, Province and District Report—Province of Xieng Khouang:
National Study on the Socio-Economic Impact of Unexploded Ordnance. Handicap
International, Vientiane, 1998.
5Ibid.
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Figure 3
Bomb craters scattered throughout the Xieng Khouang Plateau from a one-meter resolution
panchromatic IKONOS satellite image viewed at approximately 1:5,000 scale
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Figure 4
Bomb craters viewed from a hilltop between jar fields 1 and 2 (photo credits: author)
Tourism at the site remains largely unexploited due to UXO contamination, lack of
awareness and understanding of the site, and a lack of infrastructure required to support
tourism. The development of the site as a tourist destination offers tremendous income-
generation potential for Xieng Khoaung, which lacks both natural and human resources
and is one of the most economically depressed regions of Southeast Asia.
The Project In 1998, UNESCO, in conjunction with the Ministry of Information and Culture of the
Lao People's Democratic Republic, initiated a project to safeguard this important site.
The overall aims of the project were to
Create a GIS-based cultural heritage resource inventory of the Plain of Jars to
enhance understanding and management of the cultural resources of the site.
Define and map site boundaries for the three most frequently visited jar field sites
and request clearance of unexploded ordnance from these sites.
Evaluate the cultural and other resources of the Xieng Khouang plateau to identify
priorities for further research, conservation, and tourism development.
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In the longer term, it is anticipated that a management plan for the site will be developed
to guide its conservation and development, together with a submission of a nomination
for inclusion of the site on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
The Plain of Jars Project is one of a number of demonstration projects under a joint
US/ICOMOS-UNESCO Cultural Site Analysis Initiative (CSAI), the aims of which are
to implement and develop best practices for the application of GIS as a cultural resource
management tool. Support for the CSAI in the form of software and training grants were
kindly provided by the ESRI Conservation Program.
Documentation
Methodology
To map the heritage resources of Xieng Khouang, a multiscale documentation
methodology has been adopted. The overall documentation strategy focuses on the
production of three scales of spatial and associated attribute data.
Level 1: Basemapping and a reconnaissance survey of cultural heritage at an
overview scale of between 1:100,000 for the whole of Xieng Khouang Province
Level 2: Large-scale site plans for the selected pilot sites
Level 3: Detailed archaeological site surveys of priority sites (This activity will be
undertaken when more funding becomes available.)
Level 1
Documentation—
Cultural Landscape
Basemaps
Although jar fields and other megalithic features are distributed throughout central and
northern Laos and extend well beyond the borders of the Lao PDR, a project of this scope
could not attempt to document such a vast area. Instead, the project focuses on creating a
cultural resource inventory for Xieng Khouang Province, which has a high density of
archaeological sites.
However, producing basemaps for even a limited area in the Lao PDR poses problems
due to the lack of suitable topographic maps. The best available topographic maps were
published in the 1980s at a scale of 1:100,000. At the outset, it was determined that the
project would only be feasible if the required map data could be obtained from other
agencies.
Following an initial investigation of the availability of cartographic data for Xieng
Khouang, the digital data sets, listed below, were procured from the following agencies:
Science Technology and Environment Agency, Prime Ministers Office, Lao PDR
● First and second order administrative boundaries (provinces and districts)
● Settlements
● Roads
● Cart tracks and footpaths
● Rivers
UXO Lao Project6
6 Bombing data was supplied to the UXO Lao project by the Office for Humanitarian
Assistance and Demining, Department of Defense, United States of America.
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● Fighter bomber strikes 1960–1970
● B52 bomber strikes
National Geographic Department, Lao PDR
● 100 m elevation contours (from which DEM hill-slope grids will be generated)
Mekong River Commission, Watershed Classification Project
● 250 m posting DEM of the Lao PDR
Tropical Rainforest Information Center, Michigan State University
● Portion of Landsat TM satellite image
The author gratefully acknowledges the agencies listed above for the provision of these
data sets, without which, this project would not have been possible.
Reconnaissance
Survey of the
Cultural Resource of
Xieng Khouang
Province
The HLA methodology has developed from the seminal work carried out in Cornwall
(Herring 1998), which mapped the landscapes according to "Historic Character Types," a
paper-based exercise. Work in Scotland further developed the approach by mapping
"Historic Landuse" using a geographic information system (GIS) (Dyson–Bruce, 1998;
Dyson–Bruce, et al, 1999). Wales defined a "Register of Landscapes" of specific or
outstanding interest (Cadw, 1998). English Heritage (EH) has used a wide variety of
paper or increasingly GIS-based methodologies to determine "Historic Landscape
Character" in different counties (Fairclough, 1999).
To produce an initial inventory of the cultural resources of the Province, it was decided
that a participatory approach, mobilizing district officers of the Ministry of Information
and Culture and village chiefs would be used.
The provincial office of the Ministry of Information and Culture in Phonsavanne
organized seminars for its district culture officers to teach them how to create simple
heritage inventories for their districts. Subsequently, district officers met with the heads
of villages in their districts to compile a list of sites that village heads and other members
of the community knew about.
Simple inventories that comprise village name, number of sites located within the village
administrative boundary, and number of features (jars or megaliths) found at each site,
were compiled. The identified archaeological sites will be geocoded by cross-referencing
the village name listed in the inventory with the name and location of villages in the
village GIS theme to produce a very rough picture of the distribution of sites within the
Province. Following analysis of this distribution map, provincial staff, after being given
training in rudimentary archaeological documentation techniques and equipped with
GPS, will be tasked with conducting rudimentary archaeological documentation at
selected sites. An initial assessment of the survey, which is currently being compiled,
indicates that approximately 60 villages have reported the presence of previously
unrecorded sites.
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In addition to the reconnaissance cultural heritage survey data, jar fields coordinate data
from historical sources (primarily Colani's research) will be incorporated in the GIS.
Following conversion of the Colani data from a grid coordinate system based on Paris
meridian and Hanoi datum, to UTM (WGS84 datum), these data will be incorporated into
the GIS.
Level 2
Documentation—
Site Plans
To produce detailed site plans of the jar field sites, a panchromatic IKONOS image with
1 m ground resolution was acquired in August 2000. The IKONOS imagery was
geocoded using ground control points (GCP) acquired by the National Geographic
Department of Laos. In addition to the GCPs, permanent geodetic monuments were
established at each of the three jar field sites to ensure that data from future
archaeological surveys can be accurately tied to the common coordinate system utilized
for this project.
Interpretation of IKONOS imagery and field surveys are currently being undertaken to
determine the full extent of the three main jar fields. Site plans comprising jar clusters,
site boundaries, visitor facilities, roads, tracks and paths, hydrological features, and land
use will be produced from the imagery and ground survey. To ensure the safety of the
project team members, a UXO Lao team, responsible for locating and disposing of UXO,
will accompany all field survey teams during their site visits.
The vector site plan data, together with IKONOS imagery, will be supplied in digital
format to the UXO Lao project for incorporation within their GIS. This data will be used
by UXO Lao to plan and manage the survey and clearance of UXO at the three main jar
field sites.
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Figure 5
A UXO Lao survey team member searching for UXO prior to digging foundations
for a permanent geodetic control point at jar field 3
Conclusion UNESCO has been providing technical assistance to implement GIS at Cultural World
Heritage sites in the Asia Pacific region since 1992 when GIS was first used to develop a
zoning and environmental management plan for the Angkor Wat World Heritage Site in
Cambodia. During the Angkor Wat project and subsequent GIS projects in Laos, Viet
Nam, and the Philippines, GIS has proven itself to be an invaluable tool for assisting in
the documentation, protection planning, and management of cultural heritage resources.
At the Plain of Jars site, the use of GIS has enabled the implementation of a systematic
survey of the natural and cultural heritage resources of the Plain of Jars. Data collected
will be used to view, analyze, and interpret the cultural heritage resources of the site in
the context of related environmental, sociocultural, and topographic data. This will lead
to an improved understanding of the site and thus, it is hoped, enhance management and
conservation. Provided data of sufficient quality can be collected, predictive modeling
may be undertaken to identify areas of potentially high archaeological value within the
province, enabling the site managers to effectively mobilize their limited resources to
document and proactively conserve these areas. It is also anticipated that maps and other
interpretative materials for on-site display and distribution will be produced using the
GIS.
The use of a GIS at the Plain of Jars has facilitated the incorporation of data from a wide
variety of sources at many different scales. However, more important, this project
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Journal of GIS Archaeology, Volume I—April 2003 102
highlights the potential for enhanced interagency collaboration to achieve mutually
beneficial development objectives through the use of GIS. The Plain of Jars project was
conceived as a collaborative effort to safeguard both the cultural resources of the Plain of
Jars together with the lives of local inhabitants and tourists that use the sites,
necessitating the collaboration of UNESCO and its counterpart agency, the Ministry of
Information and Culture with the UXO Lao Project and its counterpart, the Ministry of
Labor and Social Welfare. The main dialog between these participating agencies has been
in the form of geographic data transfer, facilitated through the medium of GIS.
This project also highlights the ever-present problem of the high cost of spatial data
generation in situations where existing spatial data is unsuitable or unavailable. Cultural
heritage resource management GIS projects typically operate under severely restricted
budgets that are often only sufficient to cover the cost of generating cultural heritage
resource data. The use of GIS for cultural heritage resource management projects,
therefore, is often only feasible if basemap, and other data generated by third parties, can
be procured for little or no cost.
