The garden of the Roman house had suffered heavy disturbance caused by modern interventions (restorations in the 1970s, 80s and 2006-2007, modern planting in the garden at the end of the 19th-beginning of the 20th century), however, undisturbed areas were found where parts of the garden dating to the last occupation phase of the house were identified. The deepening of the excavation also revealed a small patch of the earlier garden layout, probably dating to the beginning of the 1st century A.D. In fact, the surface of the earliest garden was obliterated by a dump containing a Claudian coin. The Roman garden overlay the robber trenches relating to the walls from the previous parcelling out of the insula, dating to the late Hellenistic phase (3rd-2nd century B.C.) The walls of these preceding houses were completely dismantled, the stones recovered and the lime discarded. In fact, the entire garden area was disturbed by two large pits, one almost 6 m wide, only very partially excavated. Despite the presence of these Roman rubbish pits, small sections of structures in pappamonte blocks were identified, both inside Maiuri’s 1947 trench in the centre of the garden and in trench (3), situated on the eastern side of the house’s garden. The stone blocks belonged to terracing built to level the area occupied by Insula V 5. The find in trench (3) of another pappamonte block at a right angle to the blocks in the terrace wall suggests the presence of a more complex structure, partially destroyed and partially reused, at least at foundation level, by the subsequent Hellenistic houses.

At the same time two trenches (3 × 3 m) were dug in the north-eastern and south-eastern corners of the garden in order to document the stratigraphic sequence present below the layer of grey cinerite which at Pompeii is usually considered to be sterile soil below the archaic levels. The excavations revealed a complex geo-archaeological sequence with occupation levels dating to the Eneolithic period and the Bronze Age.