Once Given to a God, Never Simply Discarded

Greek religious thought treated a dedicated object as permanently transferred to the god's ownership, which created a real practical problem for sanctuaries that had centuries of continuous use and finite space. Priests could not simply clear out old votives the way a household might clear old possessions, since the objects remained sacred property even once damaged, unfashionable or simply too numerous to display. The standard solution was ritual burial: older votives, sometimes broken deliberately as part of the process, were interred in pits within the sanctuary grounds called favissae, keeping them within consecrated ground rather than removing them from the god's domain.

Archaeologists have recovered enormous quantities of Greek votive material from exactly these deposits, at sanctuaries from the Athenian Acropolis to smaller regional shrines, and these pits are often the single richest source for reconstructing which offerings a given sanctuary actually received across its working life, since standing collections were far more likely to be looted, melted down for metal, or lost to fire and war than a deposit deliberately hidden beneath consecrated soil. The Athenian Acropolis favissa deposits in particular preserved fragments of the archaic sculpture destroyed in the Persian sack of 480 BCE, since the Athenians buried the damaged dedications reverently rather than discarding them once the site was rebuilt.