A Second, Deeper Dig at the Same Mound

The Kapilavastu relics did not come from a new site but from a second, more careful excavation of the same Piprahwa stupa mound that William Peppe had partly dug in 1898. In 1971, the Archaeological Survey of India, led by K. M. Srivastava, reopened the mound and this time dug below the floor level Peppe had reached, exposing an earlier construction phase and recovering two inscribed steatite caskets that Peppe's shallower dig had missed entirely. The Archaeological Survey retained this later material for the national collection in New Delhi rather than sending it to Kolkata, keeping the two excavations' finds administratively separate even though they came from the same mound decades apart.

The identification of Piprahwa with ancient Kapilavastu, the Buddha's childhood home, rests substantially on inscriptions recovered across both digs, though the reading and dating of the crucial texts have been debated by specialists, complicated further by a documented history of forged Buddhist inscriptions from other sites in the same region during the colonial period, which has made scholars appropriately cautious about any single reading. The museum presents the identification as the leading scholarly view rather than as beyond question, consistent with the archaeological literature's own caution on the point.