[HN Gopher] Plain of Jars, one of the most mysterious archaeolog...
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Plain of Jars, one of the most mysterious archaeological sites,
reveals its age
Author : diodorus
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-04-30 04:42 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.livescience.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.livescience.com)
| nimos wrote:
| I wonder if there will be a similar article in 4023 when someone
| discovers a maven archive.
| ciguy wrote:
| I had the privilege to be able to visit this place a few years
| ago. I rented a motorcycle and drove around to the 3 largest jar
| sites. What this article fails to mention is that the surrounding
| area is one of the most bombed places on earth.
|
| American bombers would drop their unused payloads here after
| bombing runs over Hanoi during the American/Vietnam war. Many of
| the bombs were not armed prior to the drop, they just couldn't
| land with the extra weight and sometimes clouds prevented them
| from hitting Hanoi.
|
| As a result there are millions of unexploded ordinances still in
| the fields here. Certain areas are marked as safe and going off
| trail at the jar sites is highly discouraged. Some NGOs are
| working in the area but the USA govt never offered to help clean
| it up.
| shoo wrote:
| How is our glorious country sown? Not with wheat and corn.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1lFM1K8R1s
| altacc wrote:
| In the video you can see the old bomb craters and some jars are
| scarred or broken by the bombing. The entire country is battle-
| scarred and an amazing place to visit.
|
| I don't know what it's like these days but a couple of decades
| ago the Plain of Jars was one of the strangest historical sites
| I've visited. Partly as it's one of the few attractions where
| there were no other tourists to be seen there or in the
| surrounding towns.
| ciguy wrote:
| Agree. I remember distinctly meeting exactly one other
| tourist the whole time I was there, though to be fair it was
| cold and the off season. Still one of the coolest and
| weirdest places I have ever been.
| pan69 wrote:
| > Between May 1964 and the summer of 1969, the Plain of Jars
| was heavily bombed by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) (see Secret
| War) operating against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao
| communist forces.[6] The USAF dropped more bombs on Laos,
| primarily the Plain of Jars, than it dropped during the whole
| of World War II. This included 262 million anti-personnel
| cluster bombs. An estimated 80 million of these did not explode
| and remain a deadly threat to the population.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_of_Jars
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > This included 262 million anti-personnel cluster bombs.
|
| This is orders of magnitude more than I would have expected.
| ciguy wrote:
| The plain of jars area specifically was a dump site for
| bombers that could not drop their bombs over Hanoi due to
| weather. I believe that's partly why so many did not explode,
| they were not armed/activated prior to the drop. There are
| other parts of Laos where the USA essentially abandoned their
| Hmong alles in Laos leaving them to be slaughtered. There are
| generations of fighters living in the jungle to this day.
| contingencies wrote:
| This was about the time of Nanzhao, then.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanzhao
|
| For some period written history on this little known empire from
| the perspective of the Chinese, see _Manshu_ which I have been
| translating on Wikisource
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Title made me think of maven central
| leovander wrote:
| Title can be interpreted like the recent post, "Inheritance was
| invented as a performance hack"[0] where a user assumed it was
| going to be about money. And here, the joke about maven.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26989380
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(page generated 2021-04-30 23:01 UTC)