Greek Terracottas

This book, the first of its kind, provides a road map and research perspectives for the discipline of coroplastic studies. Named after the ancient Greek artisan, the koroplastes, who is mentioned in ancient texts as a modeler of images in clay, this discipline focuses on the hundreds of thousands of hand-modeled or mold-made clay sculptural images that are referred to as terracotta figurines, figurative terracottas, or simply terracottas. They have been found in sacred, funerary, domestic, commercial, and artisanal contexts throughout the ancient Greek world and collectively they represent the most abundant form of Greek sculpture ever discovered. Yet, compared to Greek pottery or monumental sculpture, figurative terracottas received relatively little serious scholarly attention until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Once dismissed as simple reflections of popular piety, terracottas now have formed the basis of archaeological and anthropological approaches to understanding ancient Greek religious practices, as well as artistic and social identities, and cross-cultural influences, among other areas of investigation. Finally, an understanding of the varied natures and uses of these small sculptures, most often mass produced, is intimately tied to an understanding of their methods of production that were responsible for extensive trade in terracottas and broad diffusion networks throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Black Seas.Since coroplastic studies is a relatively recent addition to the roster of specializations that comprises Greek archaeology, Greek Terracottas: A Toolkit for Research fills a huge gap in archaeological research perspectives for ancient Greece. It facilitates this study by providing detailed discussions of the diverse approaches to the study of figurative terracottas that have only recently come into prominence; chronological considerations and their pitfalls; ritual and contextual analyses; fieldwork methodologies; and a specialized lexicon.