By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
November/December 2005
Orion
An American bomb detonates on Laotian soil. Thirty years later, a villager exhumes the pieces and delivers them to a scrap metal yard. There they sit in a heap until Lee Moua, a Hmong man, plunks down a little money for a mangled chunk.
He takes the metal to his homemade blacksmith shop in a parched backyard among pineapples and sugarcane. He fires a bed of coals, working beneath a rusty roof on a bamboo frame. His bellows are made from a parachute flare canister, his anvil is an artillery shell driven into a stump. Moua heats and pounds his bomb fragment, toiling most of a sweltering afternoon.
When he finishes his work, he has a silvery object, straight from a blistering fire. Its blade is wicked sharp, capable of practical things. It is a simple creation really: a garden hoe. READ MORE (PDF)
The explosive implications of archaeology at Laos’ most puzzling site.
By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
July/August 2005
Archaeology
I’m following Belgian archaeologist Julie Van Den Bergh around Laos’ remote Xieng Khouang Province. We’re inspecting giant ancient vessels, which are scattered through rice paddies, forests, and hilltops at more than 60 sites across what is known as the Plain of Jars. Archaeologists think the jars were mortuary containers, perhaps 2,000 years old. But no one knows for sure their precise age, who built them, or why. They are swathed in mystery and surrounded by unexploded bombs.
Xieng Khouang Province is one of the most heavily bombed places on earth. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dumped four billion pounds of bombs on the country in a “secret war” against Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese communists. Up to a third of them never exploded, and they litter the land today. While generally safe to tread upon, buried UXO (unexploded ordnance) can detonate when an erratic fuse is inadvertently triggered. The earth around here is dangerous to farmers plowing fields, children staking buffalo out to graze–and to archaeologists. READ MORE
