Unlike sculptures and vase paintings, terracotta figurines have occasionally and intermittently fascinated scholars and dealers of antiquities since the Renaissance period. It was only toward the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries that studies specifically focused on figurines were published, including catalogues from museums, particularly the British Museum and the Louvre, along with initial syntheses and questions regarding iconographic considerations. For much of the 20th century, such studies were primarily related to art history, and figurines were largely viewed as a “minor art form.” A significant change occurred around the 1990s when they became a means to investigate production and distribution processes and to explore their varied uses according to the archaeological context of provenance. Gradually, the study of figurines established itself as a new field within the broader discipline of archaeology, now referred to as “coroplastic study”. This term derives from koroplastes, which in Ancient Greek signified a modeler and producer of clay images.
The definition of the study of figurines as a scientific and independent field of research has supported the spread of international conferences and workshops on the topic, as well as the proliferation of publications of monographs and catalogues, which have contributed to emphasising specific aspects of this class of material or certain geographical areas of their production.
Moreover, a network of researchers has gathered around the Coroplastic Studies Interest Group (CSIG) of the Archaeological Institute of America, which preceded the Association for Coroplastic Studies (ACoSt), aiming at promoting the systematic study and documentation of legally excavated figurative terracottas, while also recognising the necessity for responsible research regarding those figurines of unknown provenance and stratigraphic origin.
Today, scholars interested in ancient figurative terracottas approach the study from many different perspectives, including iconography, typology, and material and production techniques, while also exploring the role of these artifacts in religious, social, and economic contexts. Moreover, recent studies focus on the analysis of clay structure to identify raw material and geological provenance patterns in assemblages or pigment characterisation. Digital technology approaches have also been applied to the study of figurines in different ways. Many works point to the utility of the digital for visualisation’s scopes, data preservation, and fragment matching, while others highlight the possibility of using the digital to create a semi-automatic tool for digital classification and characterisation of the material.