The Roman building brought down by the ground itself, not by an attack

In 2023, an archaeological excavation at Las Mesas de Saladavieja — the same area where the oldest known Palaeolithic stone tools in Estepona had been documented in 2021 — uncovered the remains of a roughly square Roman rural building, about 14 by 14 metres, built in the second half of the 1st century AD. Its walls, of rubble masonry with some sandstone ashlar bound with mud, were laid out around four interior spaces. Fragments of a rotary millstone and around twenty loom weights (pondera) point to a use tied to processing agricultural and livestock produce. The building was short-lived: it lay in ruins by the late 1st or early 2nd century AD, with no signs of fire or violent destruction, because part of its foundations sat on expansive clay marls that gave way with seasonal changes in moisture. After abandonment, its materials were stripped down to the foundations themselves. The dating rests on tableware pottery — Hispanic and South Gaulish terra sigillata — found in the building's collapse layers. The dig, led by the firm Arqueotectura (César Augusto León Martín, José María Tomassetti Guerra and Cibeles Fernández Gallego) and authorised by the Junta de Andalucía, also recovered an alquerque — an ancient board game carved into the rock — now transferred to the Estepona Archaeological Museum for conservation.