Although it has faced criticism, the dominant scholarly interpretation of these deposits is that they represent war booty captured from enemy soldiers. In this, the weapon deposits have been termed "the spoils of victory." One suggestion is that the deposits represent the fulfillment of a contract with supernatural entities; in such a scenario, the victorious side had entered into a contractual obligation rooted in gift-exchange whereby they agreed to offer up their war booty in payment for victory. Accounts of artifacts being sacrificed to the gods appear on various textual sources authored by Roman writers from this period; one of these appears in the "Annals" of Tacitus, which claims that after a battle in which the Hermunduri tribe defeated the Chatti in a battle of 58 CE, the victors devoted "the enemy's army to Mars and Mercury, a vow which consigns horses, men, everything indeed on the vanquished side to destruction." An earlier source, the "Historiae Adversum Paganos" of Orosius, states that following the Battle of Arausio in 105 BCE, the victorious Cimbri tribe "destroyed all that had fallen into their hands in an unheard-of and hitherto unknown maledictory ritual; clothing was torn apart and thrown away, gold and silver were thrown in the river, the men's armour was cut to pieces, the breastplates of the horses were sunk in the waters, the people were hanged from trees with a rope around their necks".