Marking roof tiles and architectural terracottas in Greece from archaic to late roman times

Inscribing building material has been a widespread craft practice of the workshops in Greece since the Archaic age to the late Roman times. Roof tiles and clay antefixes were usually marked before being baking with symbols and names to signal ownership, destination, guarantee of quality of the product and conformity to the official metrological standards. This field of research in Greece has been little explored until now. Apart from the complete corpora of stamps of Corfu and Constantinople, my recent works on Athenian and Corinthian productions have attempted to shed a light on the role of the marks in the building industry of two crucial contexts of Greece. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the stamping process in the tile workshops: specifically I investigate its acquisition, development and spread in Attica and Peloponnese, and, through a comparative analysis on typologies of materials, categories of stamps, I pay particular attention to the principal centers of productions, Athens, Corinth and Sparta, and to the prosopography of the producers.