The corpus since the late 19 th century, some 35,000 fragments of architectural terracottas have been recorded during the excavations of the Mater Matuta sanc- tuary at satricum. 1 The site has been intermit- tently investigated by Italian and Dutch teams, the former led by Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia director Felice Barnabei and his inspector ra- nuccio Mengarelli since 1896, the latter by archae- ologists from the royal Netherlands Institute and the universities of Groningen and Amsterdam from 1977 onwards. since then, yearly campaigns have been carried out at Borgo Le Ferriere, while materials from previous excavations began to be systematically studied in the Villa Giulia, includ- ing the architectural terracotta corpus of ca 1,750 items. 2 right from the start the terracotta finds had raised the keen interest of many scholars and the wider public alike. The finds of terracotta antefixes and other coroplastics from satricum, in particular those of the early 5 th -century phase of the sanctuary, came as a total surprise and were immediately recognized as of exceptional quality. The bulk of the material was found from 1977 onwards on the satricum acropolis. over the years, the finds were made by a number of teams work- ing with different research objectives, registration methods and preservation strategies. In the course of these campaigns, most plain roof-tiles were, after being counted, inventoried, and classified per excavation trench and unit, subsequently dis- carded. These selection choices were governed by the view that a large portion of the excavation areas on the satricum acropolis then under con- sideration consisted of secondary deposits of finds dumped during the 1896-1898 campaigns. Wherever a primary deposition context was sus- pected, however, such as several settlement areas at the south and west parts of the acropolis or in the Archaic layers below the temples, more rig- orous documentation and retention policies were adopted. The result is a very large but rather un- even database. cLAssIFIcATIoN The classification principles went through several changes over the course of the decades, to end, in the late 1980s, with a five-fold, essentially chrono- logical system. At its heart sit three very clearly definable, chronologically successive terracotta groups. on the basis of their figured parts and numerous parallels all over central Italy, these three are both well attributable in a cultural sense and precisely datable. Two additional groups have been identified. one is a large corpus of undeco- rated, roughly worked, dark-red compact fabrics, referred to as Dark red; the other, a group of like- wise undecorated fabrics that are very light, both in colour and density, called Late. This five-fold classification is the end result of a long period of gestation. The key to under- standing the three core groups was found in a petrographical analysis, carried out in the mid 1980s, aimed at testing a traditional classification 89 BABESCH 88 (2013) Distinguishing colours A colorimetric approach to architectural terracottas from Satricum (Le Ferriere, Latina) Riemer Knoop Abstract The colours of the fired clays of architectural terracottas are among their most obvious characteristics. Breaking easily and being susceptible to wear and tear, they often appear without recognizable shape or form. The ques- tion is therefore frequently asked whether it is possible to classify an unadorned architectural terracotta frag- ment on the basis of the colour of its fired fabric alone. A corpus of pre-Roman material from the acropolis of the ancient city of Satricum (Le Ferriere, province of Latina, Italy) is used to consider this method of visual decision-making in terracotta classification, thanks to the categorical way in which colorimetric observations have been made for the large volume of finds. The use of Munsell colour classifications within macroscopic fab- ric descriptions is reassessed in light of the history of analytical study of this corpus of terracotta material.