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 serves as an introduction for what follows by placing the volume’s approach into the wider context of the past and current study of central Italic architecture. It points out some of the issues that underlie and join the subsequent analyses, including why so many major building projects were undertaken in Etruria, Rome, and Latium in this period, who and what was moving to create them, and how the results blur the boundaries of what has traditionally been considered ‘Roman’. Fundamentally, it argues not only for the value of central Italic architecture as a source for regional social and economic histories, but also for its potential contribution to the study of ancient architecture as a whole.