Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
HISTORY
Laos as a unified state within its present geographical boundaries has only existed for
little more than one hundred years. Its national history stretches back six centuries to
thelegendarykingdomofLaneXang,arivaltotheempiresofmainlandSoutheastAsia
until it splintered into a cluster of weak principalities dominated by their more power-
ful neighbours.
The beginnings
As long as forty thousand years ago, Laos was inhabited by
hunter-gatherers
who lived in
relatively permanent sites and used tools made of stone, wood and bamboo, not terribly dif-
ferent from many of those still in use in rural Lao villages today. By 8000 BC, these peoples
had become
farmers
, growing beans, peas and rice and domesticating animals. Excavations
at a site in present-day northeastern Thailand reveal that copper and bronze work in the re-
gion dates back four thousand years - as early as anywhere in the world.
Ironworking
was
the next step forward, and by 500 BC the inhabitants of the Khorat Plateau in northeastern
Thailand were using ploughs with iron tips, pulled by water buffalo, to cultivate wet rice.
The
earliest indigenous culture
in Laos to have been investigated by archeologists was
that of an Iron Age megalithic people who lived in what is now Xieng Khuang province on
the Plain of Jars. These people built stone pillars which were positioned next to underground
burial chambers, and large stone funerary urns to hold the ashes of their dead. The civilization
is thought to have progressed from crafting the three-metre-tall stone slabs to the massive
jars after the development of iron tools. Bronze objects as well as beads foreign to the region
suggest that the civilization was a wealthy one and lay at the centre of trade routes to China,
Vietnam and points south. However, very little else is known about this people and what be-
came of them.
By this time, broad linguistic and cultural groups were beginning to emerge in Southeast
Asia. Small villages were developing and between them there was regular communication
and trade in such items as pottery, salt and metal tools. The early inhabitants of Laos and
the surrounding parts of central and southern Indochina spoke Austroasiatic languages such
as Mon and Khmer, while the ancestors of the lowland Lao spoke proto-Tai languages, and
were still living in the river valleys of southeastern China. What is known about this group of
Tai
people comes mostly from documents written by their neighbours. Tai peoples described
in early Chinese documents were valley- and lowland-dwelling subsistence farmers who typ-
ically cultivated wet rice and vegetables and, unlike the Chinese and Vietnamese, lived in
houses built on piles. They reared water buffalo less for use as beasts of burden than as sym-
bols of wealth and status or for use in ritual.
