From about 550 to 510 BCE, Etruscan terracotta roofs display many innovations linked to terracotta roofs in Anatolia stratigraphically datable between 585 and 560/550 BCE: decorative motifs including double volutes and scrolls, lotuses, star-flowers, meanders, birds, landscape elements, centaurs, and animal battles; chariot race scenes with dogs and hares running below the horses, and particular horse trappings; painted motifs, without relief; a new polychrome palette of brown, gold, blue, and green; a white background and black outlines; L-shaped simas with an overlapping flange system; and high-relief pedimental sculpture. These features are documented pre-550 BCE at the sites of Larisa on the Hermus; Phocaea and Sardis in Anatolia; and post-550 BCE at Tarquinia, Veii, and Cerveteri (ancient Caere) in Etruria. The correspondences are so close as to indicate that artisans from Anatolia were active in Etruscan terracotta workshops for one generation after 550/540 BCE, recalling Herodotus’ stories of refugees fleeing west from Anatolia when the Persian king Cyrus began advancing into the area around 560 BCE and of Phocaean captives taken to Caere after the Battle of Alalia in 540 BCE.

This chapter analyses architectural terracottas as proxies for buildings and thus as valuable signs of construction in the city of Rome during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. In doing so, it challenges the neglect of these centuries in many histories of Roman architecture and argues that this was far from a period of architectural stagnation. Here terracottas function as temporal connectors, linking buildings across centuries in the eyes of their builders and users, and as evidence that Rome remained in touch with wider trends in building and decoration in a time that has too often been read as a rupture between a highly networked archaic world and one increasingly in thrall to Greece. Promoting the study of this era supports the view of Etrusco-Italic and Roman architecture as closely related fields of study and encourages broader recognition of terracottas as evidence not just for roofs but for buildings now lost from the archaeological record.

This chapter reconnects the architectural terracottas from different roofs of the cult building on the acropolis at Satricum with related foundations and in the process discovers a hitherto-unknown temple. While it was known that the cult building at the site went through multiple phases of extension, refurbishment, and reconstruction, the application of 3D modelling techniques in which all elements of the buildings are connected has succeeded in reconciling problematic data by identifying a new structure named ‘Sacellum II’. When the results are compared to contemporary temples in Rome, the relative precociousness of different cities’ architecture can be re-evaluated, leading to the suggestion that Caere, along with eastern Greece and Sicily, may have been influential in the development of religious architecture in central Italy. The project shows the value of studying terracottas and foundations together, something that is not done as a matter of course.