Photos: "Body Jars," Cliff Coffins Are Clues to Unknown Tribe

Mountainside Mortuary

Photograph courtesy Nancy Beavan

More pictures at National Geographic.

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Hewn from tree trunks some 700 years ago, several log coffins are pictured lined up like ramshackle piano keys beneath a rock overhang at the Phnom Pel burial site in Cambodia in 2010.

As well as being "a place apart spiritually," these "nearly inaccessible" burial locations may have been chosen to protect the dead, Beavan said.

(Interactively explore Cambodia's Greater Angkor.)

Published May 15, 2012

Body Jars

Photograph courtesy John Miksic

Skulls and other human bones poke from large ceramic jars at Khnorng Sroal, one of the newly dated mountainside burials in southwestern Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains.

The bones were placed in the 20-inch-tall (50-centimeter-tall) body jars only after the bodies had decomposed or had been picked clean by scavenging animals, according to the study, which is published in the latest issue of the journal Radiocarbon.

"The Cardamom highlanders may have used some form of exposure of the body to de-flesh the bones, like the 'sky burials' known in other cultures," study leader Beavan said.

Placing the sky-high burials couldn't have been easy, according to Beavan. Systems of ropes and bamboo baskets may have been used to raise or lower the urns and coffins to some of the trickier sites, she speculated.

Published May 15, 2012