The excavation yielded up numerous remains of the municipal infrastructure, tens of thousands of artefacts and a wealth of information on the way towns and cities developed in mediaeval Lesser Poland. The stratigraphy (layer structure) showing the story of Krosno turned out to be in an excellent state of preservation. We excavated the remains of two town halls: an early 14^th-century Gothic one in the western part of the market-place, and an early 16^th-century Renaissance one in its central part; a late 13^th-century system of wooden sewers draining into the Wisłok; and wooden water pipes made of coniferous tree-trunks with iron connecting muffs and dating back to 1366. Except for a set from Poznań, this is the oldest water system of its kind found in Poland to date. Fitted out with  special ventilation and inspection shafts, and with an exchange system for spare parts, the mechanism continued in use right up to the early 19^th century. Under the Gothic town hall we discovered  a wooden well and a cesspool, the foundations of merchants’ stalls, and vestiges of a hardened street-level surface in the 13/14^th-century market-place, a cobblestone  street surface for the 16^th-century market-place with a profiled stone sewer, a wooden birch-tar store, a water tank, and the remains of wooden 16^th-18^th-century shops. We also came across 2 forgotten 19^th-century wells.

We obtained tens of thousands of diverse artefacts, many rarities on a European scale. We recovered over 100 coins, including a half-groat (półgrosz) of Casimir the Great (1331-1370, three pennies (denary) of Queen Jadwiga (1384-1399), and Czech, Ruthenian, Swedish, and Austrian coins, gold and silver ornaments, items of apparel, parts of a horse’s harness, weapons, and iron and bronze tools. Products made from organic materials such as leather, wood, textiles, bone, and antler turned out to have been preserved in an excellent condition in the mediaeval layers. We retrieved a set of tableware which the burghers of Krosno must have used – clay jugs, pots, plates, bowls, and beakers, along with pans and glass flasks and goblets. We unearthed large quantities of ceramic stove-tiles with beautiful figural, animal and plant decorations, often with glazing in a variety of colours. In both town halls we came across the remains of clay floor tiles and stone components of the architecture such as corbels and fragments of portals.

The rarest items included a late 13th-century gold belt-buckle, a stone metal-casting mould for a Crucifixion group from the turn of the 13^th /14^th century, a 15^th-century decorated iron crossbow arrowhead, ceramic moulds for metal-casting, playing dice, merchants’ seals, weights, a 14^th-century spade, a knife with a gilt helve, a knife with a handle made of antler, a beautifully decorated wooden handle of a municipal seal or mace, a key perhaps to the municipal treasure-chest, a ceramic cup with gilt panels and the picture of a bearded man’s face (an import from Germany) which probably belonged to the mayor, a set of undamaged 15^th-century ceramic tiles showing scenes from the Bible, a large quantity of wooden, leather, linen, and woollen objects in excellent condition, ceramics including around a dozen clay pots which survived intact, floor and wall tiles, metal and glass artefacts, and whole hen’s eggs dating from the 14^th century, as well as a mediaeval toilet seat.

A collection of sandstone cellars survives from the Gothic town hall, which had dimensions of 14.2 x 10. 5 m. It ground and first floor was probably a half-timbered structure. In the cellar we found the remains of two stone portals. In one of the rooms there had been a jeweller’s workshop, which was destroyed in a fire probably in 1500. These relicts are Krosno’s “ancestral emblems”, showing that already by the 14^th century it had a special status in Lesser Poland.

The Renaissance town hall had dimensions of 21 x 14.5 m and was an edifice of  three sections with buttressed corners and a representational entrance in the west wall. It was built of bricks and sandstone. Three shafts in the east section made up an unusual find. They were vestiges of the municipal conveniences. The town hall had a water supply constructed of wooden pipes. This was the venue for council meetings and court sessions; and also the location of the municipal jail, shops and warehouses. It was dismantled after a fire in 1818, and the town forgot about it.

The excavations we carried out were one of the biggest projects of this kind on historic municipal sites in Poland and this part of Europe. In outcome of the sensational discoveries an entirely new light was cast on Krosno, a town which used to be known as Parva Cracovia (Little Cracow) and in the 14^th-16^th centuries enjoyed a status comparable to the largest municipal centres in Poland. The excellent state of preservation of the wooden artefacts have allowed us to date the discoveries very accurately using the dendrochronological method. This in itself is rare on a European scale.

These were things unknown to historians until now. The artefacts we have recovered belong to Poland’s national cultural heritage. Krosno’s Municipal Board and Council have decided that following a conservation project on the Gothic town hall, the wooden well and cesspool, the site along with exhibits now at the Sub-Carpathian Museum will be an archaeological reservation open to the public. Except for Cracow’s town hall, there’s no other structure in Lesser Poland like Krosno’s Gothic town hall. Our discoveries have transformed Krosno’s history and may well become its major tourist attraction.