A large scale illegal excavation, undertaken a few days prior to the start of the work programmed in Area 2000, a short distance away from the room paved in tufa blocks, rendered it necessary to carry out the time-consuming recovery of numerous pottery fragments from the excavated soil obstructing the area. The edges of the hole were then tidied up which made it possible to recover some of the stratigraphic data disturbed by the illegal excavators. Among the finds recovered and partially catalogued on the site were mainly building materials, probably from the roof collapse, and large containers (dolia and jars of various sizes) suggesting this was a storeroom (room 3). Also worthy of note an abundance of fine ware pottery and the presence of a small iron agricultural implement and a fraction of a bronze aes signatum.

The presence of numerous fragments of baked clay and pottery altered by exposure to heat, together with the traces of a fire found in the few undisturbed patches of stratigraphy, indicate that the settlement came to a violent end in the first decades of the 3rd century B.C., in relation to the Roman conquest. Although it was not possible to recover the ancient paving, clearly destroyed by the clandestine excavators, the remains of the walls were identified on three sides, built both with roughly hewn blocks of local trachyte of various sizes, bonded with clay and in tufa using the more evolved opus africanum technique.

The importance of the recovery operation and its obvious priority left little time for continuing the excavation proper. This was limited to the extension of the area investigated in 2001: the small trench confirmed the previously identified stratigraphic sequence, apparently intact, mainly constituted by the remains of collapsed walls, largely built of clay and tufa chunks, and of the roof comprising moderately well-preserved tiles and imbrices. The most important discovery was that of a wall made of an usual mixture of irregular-shaped, materials, not visible on the surface, aligned with that forming the northern perimeter of the paved room excavated in 1997. Other emerging masses were present in the intermediate unexcavated space, which can thus also be attributed to the frontage of the large building in Area 2000 facing onto the road.