The 2007 excavation expanded out of the area of the apse and opened the western area of the rectangular room, which in 2006 we had determined rested on a double-level hypocaust. The total area now exposed by this research team over the three excavation seasons is 63 m.2

Although our excavation this year revealed many architectural features that contribute to our understanding of how the structure developed and how it functioned, at every turn we came upon evidence that the previous excavator, Umberto Ciotti, had been there before us. Since he left us no excavation records, it is our chief task to give scientific documentation to this important monument. Thus, it is disturbing to see how very much of the original context has been removed or destroyed.

In our attempt to reconstruct the history, not only of the baths, but also of their various excavations and pillagings, we have concentrated on architectural elements that have been torn from their original contexts and either tossed outside the structure or reused for purposes for which they were not intended. The most puzzling of these odd finds is a small, decorative column, sculpted with an overall design of overlapping leaves, a form that resembles one of the columns of Ptolemy’s pleasure tent, and turns up in elongated form in Third and Fourth Style Pompeian wall paintings. It was found, encrusted with concrete, under a wall, which had been built in the form of a partial vault to cover it. This wall runs south from the southern wall of the rectangular room.

We excavated the last quadrant of soil remaining in the apse to trace the southward continuation of the double-story hypocaust and its relationship to the western wall of the rectangular room. We found that, beneath the hypocaust floor of the apse, the wall continued and was coated with the same hydraulic plaster as we had discovered last year coating that wall on the exterior of the building. There would be no reason to plaster an interior wall of the sub-floor; this must indicate that that apse was added later. In fact, a shallow niche seems to have been cut into the straight wall to accommodate the insertion of the end of the southern arc of the apse. Beneath the soldiers, the vertically placed bricks in exterior of the south wall of the rectangular room, appeared a drain. New quadrants opened to the east of the previously exposed mosaic floors yielded evidence that the double-story hypocaust continued eastward. Traces of mosaic pavements, one of them white with wide red stripes, indicate that it was from here that the finer mosaic floors had been robbed out.

Quadrants opened within the structure, where previous excavators had dug, yielded very few artifacts or pottery. On the exterior of the building, however, where the soil overburden was deep, the finds were voluminous. The small object finds continue to suggest a feminine presence: many glass sherds from very delicate vessels, and two beads, one of glass and one of carved black shell. Several sherds of vernice nera turned up in various loci, unfortunately not in the contexts of their original use. Nonetheless, their consistent presence suggests that the site may have been in use in the late 3rd century B.C.