For almost a century, caches have been regular discoveries at most Preclassic and Classic Maya sites (ca. 800 BC–AD 950). As early as the 1960s, William Coe noticed a number of recurring patterns (Tikal Report No. 27A). Fifty years after the end of the Tikal Project's excavations, it was nonetheless necessary to review the data from all the successive projects to identify new deposits and reanalyze contexts deemed problematic. As a result, 343 caches are now identified at Tikal, of which 97% can be assigned to a recurrent Ritual Cache Complex on the basis of a combination of etic criteria including content, context of discovery, and chronology. Their study confirms a link between architectural and depositional sequences but also probable functions as gift offerings and agentive tools used by the whole population for ceremonies closely related to the type of structure in which they were performed. Finally, the repetition of cases provides a cautious basis for emic interpretations, thanks to the support of ethnographic comparisons. This organization of rituals into recurring patterns goes beyond Tikal and even the Maya area. This article is thus a first step toward a future larger-scale study.

This report examines the deposit of a sixteenth-century cache of silver aquillas within a Chachapoya household at the site of Purun Llacta de Soloco. The report examines their context and contents. These findings have implications for a larger examination of social value in Andean societies and the specialized treatment and use of ritual objects during the tumultuous colonial period.

Excavations by Chichester and District Archaeology Society on the site of a Roman villa at Warblington, near Emsworth, Hampshire, revealed a small stone cist containing two lead packages. While interpretation as a burial is explored, it appears more likely that the cist and its contents represent a ritual deposit within a domestic structure.

This article examines a group of ten Indonesian inscriptions citing a range of gāthās, mantras and dhāraṇīs. The texts, contextualized and in some cases read and identified for the first time, underline the pan-Asian character of Buddhism and the integral place the Indonesian archipelago once held in the ancient Buddhist world. The identification of the sources of several of these texts in known Sanskrit scriptures raises the question whether some of these texts, none of which survives as such in the archipelago, were once transmitted there in manuscript form.