Even the first City Museum, founded in 1902, needed its artifacts to be cleaned, stabilized, assembled, and restored. Many objects kept in the museum were processed during that period, using the methods and products available at the time. It is not known who worked on the materials, but it likely involved people from various backgrounds, from workers, archaeologists, and historians to the museum's own curator. During the Austrian administration, more demanding restorations were carried out in Vienna.
The Restoration Department, popularly called the "laboratory," was established in the second half of the 20th century, specifically for the needs of setting up the new permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum of Istria in 1968 and 1973.
The name Department of Conservation and Restoration Works was defined in 2024. However, regardless of official and unofficial names, the department has always been involved in processing archaeological material that regularly arrives from various sites.
Upon arrival at the museum, the material is immediately washed, sorted, dried, and packaged. Conservation and restoration are the next steps, where fragments are thoroughly examined, cleaned, consolidated, assembled into a whole, and missing parts are reconstructed when possible.
The most common materials in the department are ceramics, glass, metal, and stone, but bone objects, amber, and even fragments of frescoes and mosaics are also frequently processed.
When necessary, the staff also goes into the field to perform primary processing of finds on-site, such as collecting urns from the prehistoric necropolis site behind the Twin Gates, applying protective facing to mosaics and frescoes for their complete processing at the Pula - Kandlerova Street site, or carrying out conservation and restoration work on the two pylons of the inner city gate behind the Twin Gates.
The department also performs work for other museum institutions.
