During the season of 2005 the excavations were undertaken in front of the Tripartite Building to the east of the Theatre aiming to enlarge earlier excavations and extend the search for the Forum, which revealed itself, more than three metres down, in three trenches. The area was paved with limestone slabs and bounded by a gutter along its perimeter and by two marble steps leading to a colonnaded portico. At the north this was crowned by the Tripartite Building.
The Tripartite Building is associated with a monumental inscription dedicated to Minerva Augusta – though any such shrine was probably the fourth in a sequence of buildings occupying this spot. The earliest structure appears to be an east-facing Hellenistic structure, which may have functioned as a temple. The Tripartite Building faces south and its construction can be linked to a Roman building programme intended to monumentalise the northern end of the Forum. The building was richly painted and adorned with revetments of imported marbles, and may have been linked to cult spaces close to a sacred Hellenistic well cut into the acropolis hill. In front of the building, a large rectangular brick structure may have served as a base for a monumental statue group.