Abstract: Plasma photonic crystals composed of periodic plasma and dielectric materials have attracted considerable attention because of their tunable photonic band gaps, but only their band structures or negative refractive index properties have been addressed in previous works. In this paper, through studying the transmission and reflection characteristics of two types of two- dimensional plasma photonic crystals, it is found that plasma photonic crystals play an important role in absorbing waves, and they show broader band and higher amplitude absorption characteris- tics than bulk plasmas. Also, the absorption of plasma photonic crystals can be tuned via plasma parameters; varying the collision frequency can make the bandwidth and amplitude tunable, but cannot change the central frequency, whereas varying the plasma frequency would control both the location and the amplitude of the absorbers. These features of plasma photonic crystals have potential for terahertz tunable absorber applications.