Placing stamps on everyday objects was a very widespread practice in the Greek and Roman world from Archaic to late Roman times. Bricks, roof tiles and architectural terracotta elements very often were marked before baking with symbols and names, which provided indications of ownership, destination, guarantee of quality of the product and conformity to official metrological standards.
A remarkable number of studies on Roman stamps have been conducted since the pioneering works of H. Dressel (CIL XV, 1891), H. Bloch (Supplement to XV volume of CIL, 1948) and E.M. Steinby (Lateres Signati Ostienses, 1977). Nonetheless, the stamping process of the Greek world has been little investigated: Corfu (Kindt 1997), Constantinople (Bardill 2004), Athens and Attica (De Domenico 2015) are by far the only extensively published contexts.
This lecture would be the occasion to present a diachronic overview of all the available stamps on building materials from Corinth. Preliminary results from the analysis of typological and chronological, as well as topographical and prosopographic data, will be also discussed.