Terracotta Imitation of Jewelry. Iconography and function

Between the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 3rd century B.C., the practice of reproducing jewellery and other objects used as personal ornament in the medium of gilded clay spread throughout the Greek world. The close comparisons drawn between such objects and prestigious artifacts of jewellery have led scholars to assign the former the function of "clay imitations of gold jewellery”, i.e. as reproductions of high quality items produced out of far "poorer" material with the intent to meet a wider demand. However, the data culled from the numerous ancient cemeteries discovered in northern Greece, Bulgarian Thrace, and Magna Graecia (Taras), as well as in many other sites that have yielded these products, offer a new interpretation. The most significant results to emerge from the research can be summarized as follows: 1) For each of the aforementioned areas the records point to an overall scarcity of such products with respect to the other categories of clay artifacts and gold jewellery of similar date recovered in the same areas. This data is incongruent with any notion of mass production that the low cost would presumably have encouraged. 2) These gilded clay objects are chiefly found in funerary contexts, in either the most elite of monuments such as the tombs in Derveni and the Mound Tjulbe in the valley of Kazanluk (Bulgary) or more modest tombs, which stand out nonetheless for their sheer number and variety of materials together with the highly refined taste that choice items among their burial goods reflect. The latter tombs frequently boast valuables made out of gold, silver, ivory and alabaster that reveal the owners’ belonging to an emerging social class while confirming the luxury status to be assigned to these objects. 3) Though in some geographical areas the gilded terracotta objects are associated with the funerary rite of cremation, still others appear inside inhumation burials. The placement of these items in the tombs indicates, however, that their use is strictly connected to the funeral ritual and to be distinguished from the rest of the burial goods. 4) The use of these objects likely originated from a fad born in Macedonia, where a particular category of gilded pottery, serving analogous funerary purposes, was in vogue during the same period. This datum suggests that this region assigned a high value to the practice of gilding, whose open display together with that of other precious materials had become a status symbol.