Find location
The first step is regularly not the recovery itself, but securing the situation. Unnecessary walking over the site, shifting items, or premature exposure changes positional relationships and can destroy traces. For that reason alone, the site should be disturbed as little as possible and the existing condition documented as completely as possible.
Important recovery principles begin already here: secure the site, avoid unnecessary access, and document the finding photographically and, where useful, by sketch before any recovery. No coarse shovel work should take place in the immediate vicinity of the finding.
Documentation
Helpful are overview and detail photographs, scale references, orientation, description of the surroundings, and any information on what has already been changed. What matters is not only the individual item, but the context: the position of the finds relative to one another, associated finds, stratification, and recognisable disturbances.
Good documentation later facilitates not only the anthropological examination, but also the classification of the find context, completeness, additional searching, and possible relocation. For later evidential value it is therefore often not the individual method that is decisive, but the quality of the early foundational work.
Recovery
In recovery, restraint is regularly more important than speed. Fragile regions, in particular the facial skull, dental rows, and thin-walled structures, are especially at risk. Improper cleaning, mechanical stress, or incomplete preservation can considerably reduce later possibilities of comparison.
Finds should therefore, as far as possible, be packaged individually or in small groups, and their positional information preserved. Scattered small finds, teeth, and where appropriate relevant soil samples should also be searched for specifically, because precisely such details can later become disproportionately important.
Small finds and sensitive regions
Small fragments, individual teeth, and other easily overlooked finds often have a disproportionately high later value. Precisely for that reason, small finds should be systematically secured and not treated as incidental.
The practical core is simple: whoever documents cleanly at an early stage, preserves positional relationships, and protects fragile structures usually improves the later anthropological classification more than any later supplementary method.
The typical spectrum of findings includes species determination, assessment of the number of individuals, anthropological classification according to preservation, completeness, and find context, and—where assessable—indications of sex, age at death, stature, pathological changes, traces of treatment, and other abnormalities. Personal identification may later be based in particular on dentition, radiographs, as well as disease- or treatment-related features.
Many later opportunities for identification therefore do not depend on spectacular methods, but on sound basics: whether front teeth were recovered, whether facial bones remained intact, whether positional relationships were documented, and whether small finds were not lost.