Mass and other conserved Noether charges are discussed for solutions of
gravity theories with locally Anti-de Sitter asymptotics in 2n dimensions. The
action is supplemented with a boundary term whose purpose is to guarantee that
it reaches an extremum on the classical solutions, provided the spacetime is
locally AdS at the boundary. It is also shown that if spacetime is locally AdS
at spatial infinity, the conserved charges are finite and properly normalized
without requiring subtraction of a reference background. In this approach,
Noether charges associated to Lorentz and diffeomorphism invariance vanish
identically for constant curvature spacetimes. The case of zero cosmological
constant is obtained as a limit of AdS, where Λ plays the role of a
regulator.Comment: 8 pages, RevTeX, no figures, two columns, references added and minor
typos corrected, final version for Phys. Rev.
