Lecture series

At the first two days of the IP a block of introductory lectures have been held, which guided us into the art and archaeology of the Roman period, the town of Apulum and the research methodology of the project. The lectures of the first week were related to the history of the city, the archaeological discoveries, cultic discoveries and many other interesting topics, which offered a wide knowledge about the location where the excavation is taking place, in the most entertaining way. Besides the large amount of information, we were delighted by the interactive methods that were used during the presentations. On the third day the participants visited the city and the archaeological museum, which further expanded the knowledge of the students about the history and beautiful monuments of Alba Iulia.

News from the lab

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.

Excursion to Alburnus Maior

On the 25th of August, the participants of the Erasmus IP visited Roşia Montană/Verespatak (Alburnus Maior), which was one of the most important gold mining sites of Roman Dacia. Several mining galleries have been identified during the archaeological researches, and the site is also famous as the findspot of the famous Roman wax writing tablets. Besides these unique finds, the civilian settlement of Alburnus Maior has also yielded some important epigraphic monuments. These altars and stela frequently attest the presence of Illyrian miner colonists, who lived in the settlement and worked in the mines, since they were experts in gold and silver mining in their homelands.
Beneath the small town of Rosia Montana one of the largest gold deposit in the World are buried, so due to the fact that the joint venture Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (RMGC) secured the license to extract the deposit by strip-mining, the country and also the wider public is divided because of its environmental issues and the endangerment of the historical and archaeological heritage of the area.

The project T-Shirt

We finished the brainstorming about the project T-shirt. Here is the result!