Cambodian jungle graveyard mystifies experts

Over a hundred 'burial jars' and a dozen coffins arranged on a ledge in remote Cambodian jungle have for centuries held the bones -- and secrets -- of a mysterious people who lived alongside with the Angkor era.
Why the bones were placed in jars on a cliff some 100 metres high in the Cardamom Mountains, or indeed whose remains they are, has long puzzled experts.
For seven years Nancy Beavan, an archaeologist who specialises in carbon dating, has been looking for an answer, painstakingly piecing together clues left by the enigmatic people at 10 sites dotted across the area in southwestern Cambodia.

Tests show some of the bone fragments are six centuries old, according to the New Zealander.
"Why put these bones in jars? This was a practice that was not observed in any other part of Cambodia," she said.
Ten jars, dating from the 15th to the 17th centuries, and twelve coffins -- the earliest from the 14th century -- have been found at the Phnom Pel site.

Some are believed to have come from the kingdom of Siam, now Thailand. Others, a minority, date back to the powerful kingdom of Angkor, which ruled for six centuries and built the famous Angkor Wat temple complex further to the north.

But experts remain mystified as to why the bones were preserved in a Buddhist country where cremation is -- and was -- a key religious custom.
Tep Sokha, an expert in Cambodian ceramics, said the jars are of the "highest ceramic quality" and the number indicates that "this was a sacred and widely practiced ritual."
If villagers living near the cliff were aware of the jars, they have stayed away, allowing foreigners to study the relics at their leisure. And the whole study has been left to Beavan's team.
They are picking through the evidence, often left to guess the origins of the artifacts they find including 12 coffins lined up on a rock that are so small they could not even hold a child's body but which contain the bones of men and women.

"These coffins are unique. There is no other example in the history of Cambodia. They are relics that have never been disturbed," Beavan adds.
Among her theories is that the bones belonged to Khmer tribesmen who lived deep in the mountains far from the influence of the Angkor kingdom, which spanned Southeast Asia from the ninth to 15th centuries, but perhaps failed to reach this corner.