Invocation of the restless dead is often not made explicit in defixiones discovered in ancient tombs and graves. As at Chagnon, relatively few of the curse texts found in such contexts make reference to their funerary surrounds. In some cases it appears that the agency of a resident restless spirit is just assumed in funerary defixiones; on other occasions underworld gods are called upon (Pluto and Persephone at Chagnon), much as if the deposition of the curse in the funerary site itself was sufficient to ensure that the infernal powers would receive and enact it. Some curse tablets are not as simply to be interpreted as are even defixiones which are merely laconic in this way, however. Many bear texts which are too short or too elliptical to allow proper interpretation – few funerary binding spells are as well contextualised, say, as are the Celtic finds from Bath. Moreover, lead is not the most durable of materials; it fragments relatively easily. The analysis of many curse lamellas is consequently hampered by poor states of preservation. In other instances, however, it is rather more obviously odd or otherwise unclear features of the spell inscriptions themselves which makes modern understandings of them so fragmentary.

In August 1930, for example, Roman ruins were discovered while gas works were being carried out in the western Austrian town of Bregenz, known in ancient times as Brigantia (i.e. ‘the high’), a Celtic name that no doubt referred to the elevation of the Alpine settlement. Among the ancient stonework, bones and fragments of pottery, the remains of a first-century grave was discovered in which a small, rolled-up lead sheet had been deposited. When unrolled, the lamella was 115mm long, 43mm broad and about 0.5mm thick – a typicalenough spell tablet by Roman standards. The text written on it was almost illegible, however: the inscription at first seemed mostly to represent Latinate gobbledygook. Nonetheless, it was later shown mostly just to be written in a strange manner, full of abbreviations, local spelling oddities and lines of Latin which had been written backwards: not with the characters written facing right to left, but with the words spelt in reverse.

The Austrian scholar who deciphered the text was an expert in the interpretation of curse tablets and soon recognised that it was a curse comparable to another funerary defixio from Bregenz which had first come to light in 1865.