This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Curse Tablet Deposit gathers four of the atlas's major finds of ancient binding tablets, groupings recovered as a body from a single site rather than as isolated survivals, and together they trace how the practice moved from Greece across the Roman world.
The Attic Curse Tablets, recovered over more than a century from Athenian graves, wells and sanctuary deposits, are the earliest large body of this material anywhere, and the earliest examples do little more than list a rival's name, as though writing it on lead and putting it out of reach were the whole of the act; their characteristic verb, katadeo, to bind down, gives the modern term katadesmos. The Bath Curse Tablets, about a hundred and thirty sheets thrown into the sacred spring at Aquae Sulis, are addressed to the goddess Sulis Minerva and are almost all theft complaints, the writer naming what was taken and asking that the thief be denied sleep, health or life until it is restored; they are the largest body of everyday Latin writing from Roman Britain. The Uley Curse Tablets follow the Bath pattern closely enough to show a shared British convention, addressed instead to Mercury at his temple in Gloucestershire, though lead's corrosion leaves only a minority legible.
The Sethian Curse Tablets of Rome show the practice turned to a different target, chariot racing: named drivers, named horses and named factions, evidence of an organised industry of binding built around the circus rather than personal grievance or theft.