A note on two ritual depositories from Pimai, Thailand
This note by Alastair Lamb documents two ritual deposit holders of grey stone discovered at the Khmer site of Pimai, Thailand, and situates them within the broader typological discussion of chambered reliquaries and deposit containers in Southeast Asia and Ceylon.
Lamb’s primary purpose is to provide a comparative frame of reference for the nine-chambered reliquaries from Chandi Bukit Batu Pahat in Kedah, which had already attracted considerable scholarly attention from Quaritch Wales, O’Connor, and Treloar (p. 68). The first Pimai specimen is a long block of grey stone with sixteen square depressions arranged in a square around a larger central square depression, which Lamb judges to have been part of the last course of a structure’s foundations (p. 69). The second is a roughly cubic block with a tenon on its upper surface, bearing eight square depressions surrounding a central square depression adjacent to a circular one; Lamb notes its functional similarity to the type E pillar bases at Chandi Bukit Batu Pahat but finds a closer parallel with the deposit holder from Satingphra in Songkhla (p. 70). Lamb concludes that the Pimai objects are characteristic of reported Khmer practice and do not diminish the close similarities he had previously identified between the Kedah reliquaries and Javanese examples, while calling for a systematic typological survey of deposit holders across Southeast Asia and Ceylon (p. 70).