This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

The Road to the central highland plateau of Sienkwang in northern Laos is a rough one.

It climbs and twists, revealing to the traveler's sweeping vistas at every turn.

Terraced fields were cattle graze and dramatic limestone cliffs. The road itself is frequently broken with deep ruts and occasional washouts slow traffic to a crawl. There in the

remote misty heights, giants dominate the landscape, massive stone vessels that give the plateau

its name, the plain of jars.

These vessels are not modest, some rising up to three meters in height, with some weighing

up to 30 tons.

Their shapes vary nearly as much as their sizes, some cylinders, some with their large stone

lids resembling mushrooms.

Many are cracked and worn, their surfaces ground down

over time by the wind and the weather. The jars are spread out over a massive territory. Some

stand alone as watchful sentinels, while others are densely clustered together as strange stone forests.

In the late 1920s, French geologist and archaeologist Madeline Colani traveled to Laos to

conduct the first comprehensive study of these jars.

She spent months on sites mapping each jar with meticulous care, sketching configurations,

and conducting excavations.

...