The hundreds of female figurative terracottas that have been brought to light at the ancient Macedonian geographical region of Bottiaea and which date back to the Hellenistic period, provide us with excellent information about their typology, usage, diffusion, and meaning. In the present paper, attention will be paid to the coroplastic workshops of Macedonian cities that are differentiated from one another by local particularities but also have a lot in common. The established affinities of the terracotta figurines produced by the large terracotta workshops in Pella and Beroia, the two most important cities of Bottiaea in producing clay figurines, reveal the popularity of certain iconographic types and their variants. The main iconographic types were formed in other regions of the Mediterranean and from there they spread to local coroplastic centers of Macedonia, mainly through mold trade. For this essay, I will refer to small-scale terracotta figurines. My dissertation’s goal is a comparative study of the produced iconographic types in Bottiaea. However, due to the limited length of the essay I have excluded the figurines that are not depicted alone and also the seating female terracottas. The whole of the figurines I have studied constitute individual, standing, female figurines. Apart from studying the iconographic types and their diffusion, it is essential that we place figurines in specific contexts. Dealing with function and meaning issues of the female terracottas, secure and meaningful burial contexts lead to satisfying conclusions. In the framework of interpreting figurines, the interpretation, any assumption and of course the symbolism of the terracotta figurines, will be associated with the burial context they were used in. Moreover, modern research in Bottiaea has acknowledged that terracotta figurines were part of the funeral ritual and their presence in funeral context was commensurate with the gender, age and religious beliefs of the deceased. The interpretation of figurines is a complex issue with many parameters. I could have explained which the burial customs and the position of the clay figurines on them were, but due to the extensive research and the many socio-religious theories developed, the present paper would have gone far beyond the permissible word limit, thus I avoided it. Finally, a significant question to be answered is: were figurine types influenced by their use as grave goods or were figurines manufactured regardless their usage?
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