What have archaeologists discovered during the excavations?
For example - a Roman road (which has been visibly repaired several times), a small Roman settlement, a burial site along the road at Špina, which in the Roman period was always located along the road, the remains of an independent farm were found - the well-preserved stone foundations of a building with an extension were discovered at the site of Belice (two construction phases were identified. According to the small material found, the building was in use from the beginning of the 1st century to the middle of the 1st century), a Roman villa rustika was discovered - a country house with a property dating from the 2nd half of the 2nd century. The farmstead is a rural farmstead with a farmstead dating from the 1st half of the 1st century AD to the beginning of the 2nd century AD.
Archaeologists have uncovered pottery, glass, iron objects, building materials dating back to the 1st century. Other notable finds include fragments of a remarkable glass bowl with incised decoration, a glass handle, cups, fragments of sigillate plates, fragments of a thin-walled cup with barbotine decoration, fragments of a scaled beaker, and a fragment of a sealing oracle disc. Keys, silver rings and novices were also found. Among the finds discovered, it is worth mentioning the discovery of various tools, such as a knife for pruning trees and shrubs, a sawdust file, a bucket handle and iron spikes for harrows. The latter are rare finds in Slovenia and prove the sophisticated way in which farming was carried out in Roman times.
Archaeologists have also found roadside burials, three of which belong to the bustum type. This is a very rare form of funerary ritual in which the deceased is burnt directly over the burial pit. The large number of larger nails in the graves are identified as elements for parts of the wooden structure supporting the pyre, while the smaller nails probably belonged to the shoes of the deceased. All burial pits had burnt walls and bottoms, precisely because of this burial method. According to the material discovered, this part of the burial site dates to the late 1st and first half of the 2nd century AD. The burial site at Špina 1, however, is younger, with skeletal graves. Various small objects were found in the graves, including a bronze obituary of Trajan, an amber ring with a plastic representation of a woman's head, a clear-glass embalming jar, a sealing ointment with an appliqué of a tragic mask, a bronze obituary of Domitian, an iron rod thickened at one end and with a square plate behind the thickening. While the specific status of the deceased in the graves at Špina 2 cannot be confirmed, it may be that the role played by the bustum burial type suggests that the deceased at Špina 2 were Roman immigrants rather than Romanised local inhabitants.
Another extremely interesting find for our archaeologists is a scarab-shaped pendant made of Egyptian faience. It is a pendant that was made in ancient Egypt. It came to our region by trade. Only two faience pendants in the shape of a scarab have been discovered in Slovenia, the first in Vrhnika and the second in Špina.
However, a rhinoceros was also found during excavations in the area of the second railway line. More specifically, its bones, which are at least 120 000 years old or even much older, and which already look very much like stone. If it had not been for the geologists and palaeontologists on the construction site of the future railway line, just before the first portal of the first tunnel (T1), some three kilometres from Divača, the rhino would not have been recognised by the lay eye. The find seems to be all the more special because the palaeontologists have estimated that it is a species of rhinoceros, which is not so common in this area. It is thought to be a Stephanorhinus rhinoceros from the Middle Pleistocene, and certainly not the two other, more common species - the woolly rhinoceros or Merck's rhinoceros