When builders working at Railliement Square found three sarcophagi, Inrap teams were not far behind. Two months earlier, under the direction of Elodie Cabot, they had  uncovered a dozen or so graves and part of Saint-Mainbœuf church in nearby rue Alsace, which had been destroyed in the 19th century during the creation of the street. A new preventive archaeological excavation was decided upon. It extended over approximately 100 m2 and required two months of post-excavation analysis by six people in autumn 2008.
A total of forty-three tombs were excavated. Twenty-five of them are sarcophagi and fifteen are schist coffins. Three more modest ones were placed directly in the earth or in wooden coffins. They were all arranged along the walls of the nave of  Saint-Maurille, near the choir. The different inhumation types attest to a long occupation of the funerary space before and after the foundation of the church itself.
With the exception of a highly worn coin from the Early Roman Empire, found in the sarcophagus of a child, there are no clear chronological markers. The rectangular or trapezoidal form of the sarcophagi and the materials used suggest a period of activity between the 4th and 8th centuries: the sarcophagi in limestone from the Touraine region, as well as those showing the reuse of Roman limestone blocks, are older (4th-5th centuries); the shelly limestone was commonly extracted from quarries in the Maine-et-Loire (Doué-la-Fontaine) area during the 7th-8th centuries.

Some of the sarcophagi contain only one individual, while for others the bone deposits indicate successive inhumations and reduction, the pushing aside of earlier skeletons. This particular practice mostly concerns the smaller sarcophagi (70 x 155 cm), with more than twenty child deposits in one of them. This required frequent reopening of the tombs and thus easy access to the sarcophagi.
One sarcophagus has angular decorations on the four corners of its cover. According to Angers tradition, this would be the sarcophagus of the Bishop Saint Maurille. It contained the complete or anatomically connected remains of a young adult. We know from texts that the bones of the bishop, as well as the relics, were removed during the 7th century and so these are not his remains. Considering the position and the size (72 x 210 cm) of the sarcophagus, we can suppose that this skeleton is that of a member of the urban elite.
The reputation of Saint Maurille, the fourth bishop of Angers, could explain the high proportion of children, especially very young ones, in the tombs. Bishop Maurille was particularly renowned for having resurrected a seven year old child who died in his church before being confirmed. The child, from then on named René (literally "he who is born a second time"), would succeed him and become Bishop René. Long after this miracle, followers appeased the pain of losing a child by having him buried in the cemetery under the protection of the eponymous bishop.

The site of the discovery itself challenges hypotheses previously formulated concerning the situation and the dimensions of Saint-Maurille. Though the analysis of the human bones is still in progress, the first results concerning the individual tombs tend to indicate possible family groupings by sector, which are most clearly evident for adults. It also appears that some of the inhumations could be older than the first church, constructed during the 5th century under the episcopate of Maurille. Could the religious vocation of this part of the city, a true convergence of churches, be based on a funerary tradition of the end of the Classic Roman period? Future archaeological research should contribute to a better understanding of why so many basilica were constructed on this site.