The Piprahwa Stupa, containing relics of Buddha (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society)

William Claxton Peppe's The Piprahwa Stupa, Containing Relics of Buddha, published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1898 with an accompanying note by the Indologist Vincent A. Smith, is Peppe's own primary excavation report describing his discovery of the stupa, its stone reliquary coffer and its contents on his Birdpur estate in what is now Uttar Pradesh. Its strength is that it is the excavator's contemporaneous first hand account, published promptly in a leading learned society journal with an independent scholar's supporting note, rather than a later reconstruction. Its limit is that 1898 excavation and recording standards fell well short of modern archaeological practice, so specific claims about stratigraphy or precise findspot detail should be checked against later archaeological reassessment of the site rather than taken as definitive from the original report alone.