Over the next several months, the excavation unearthed three large prehistoric dwellings: horseshoe-shaped huts with clearly demarked entrances, living areas, and the equivalent of kitchens. Researchers found dozens of pots, pottery plates, and crude hourglass-shaped canisters that still contained fossilized traces of almonds, flour, grain, acorns, olive pits, even mushrooms. Simple partitions separated the rooms; one hut had what appeared to be a loft. The tracks of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, as well as their human masters, crisscrossed the yard outside. The skeletons of nine pregnant goats lay in an enclosed area that included an animal pen. If a skeleton can be said to cower, the bones of an apparently terrified dog huddled under the eaves of one roof. What preserved this prehistoric village, what formed a perfect impression of its quotidian contents right down to leaves in the thatch roofs and cereal grains in the kitchen containers, was the fallout and surge and mud from the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius. Claude Albore Livadie, a French archaeologist who published the initial report on the Nola discovery, dubbed it "a first Pompeii."

During May and June 2001, provincial archaeological authorities oversaw excavation of the site. Mastrolorenzo hurried out to Nola, about 18 miles (29 kilometers) east of Naples. He and Pappalardo took samples of the ash and volcanic deposits, which contained chemical clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But then the scientific story veered off into the familiar opera buffa of Italian archaeology. The owner of the site agitated for construction of the supermarket to resume or to be compensated for the delay—not an unusual dilemma in a country where the backhoes and bulldozers of a modern economy clang against the ubiquitous remains of ancient civilizations.

Government archaeologists hastily excavated the site and removed the objects. As it turns out, the supermarket was never built, and all that remains of a site that miraculously captured one of civilization's earliest encounters with volcanic destruction is a hole in the ground on a vacant, weed-choked lot, the foundation walls of the huts barely visible. A small, weathered sign proclaiming the "Pompeii of Prehistory" hangs limply from a padlocked gate.

The sad archaeological scenario of Nola has repeated itself several times. In 2002, an Italian construction company under contract to the U.S. government to build a support facility for the large U.S. Navy base in the southern Mediterranean uncovered another ash-covered village near the modern town of Gricignano di Aversa; it was, according to Mastrolorenzo, even more extensive than the Nola site, with traces of numerous Copper and Bronze Age huts. "They spend a short time 'documenting' the site," Petrone said sarcastically of archaeologists who examine construction sites, "and then it is destroyed."