In parallel with the excavation, a small group of archaeologists, researchers and students, called the lab-people, work at the university, located in the centre of the fortress, right next to the principia of legionary fort. This laboratory is dealing with all the finds that come from the site: pottery, animal bones and small finds.
All those ceramic fragments that are collected at the excavation are washed, quantified and the typical fragments are photographed and drawn, so afterwards a great deal of statistical information helps us to understand different aspects of the site.
The small find-team has the honor of recording all the finds belonging to the special material categories: glass, metal, worked bone, stone and rare types of pottery. They make the small find cards, they draw it, take photos and measurements of all the pieces, and they also introduce all this information – along with others coming from the site – into a database. They look for analogies and try as hard as they can to date the different contexts of the site.
The badly preserved finds or many fragments of the same vessel are sent to the restoration laboratory, where from the ashes of old things some marvelous pieces are reborn.
In all these processes from day to day a larger amount of students are taking part, learning the basics of pottery and small find registering and restoration.
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