This season the Butrint Training School intended to initiate a new stage in the programme and sustain an excavation that would be projected for three years but managed fully by an Albanian staff drawn from the student cadres for previous years. 
A total of 13 new Albanian undergraduate students were recruited from, the University of Tirana, Skopje, Pristina, Gjirokastra, La Sapienza and Siena.

A completely new site on the Vrina Plain, the venue for previous seasons of work, was selected as the most promising training ground and also because it was intended that this would provide a valuable control on the sequence of deposits hat had be previously investigated at both Diaporit and the site of the peristyle house/basilica on the plain.

The training excavation trench was positioned with reference to the geophysical survey over a strong square anomaly that it was hoped would prove to be an element of the villa complex.

A preliminary sequence of five identified phases was recovered from the excavations.
The first phase that was identified was the construction of a bath building which seems to have been part of a larger complex.
This whole early complex is mostly undated, but data recovered in 2003 suggested that the bathhouse was of second century AD construction.

The second phase saw the building of a substantial stone mausoleum which can be firmly dated to the early third century by the presence of ARS and Campanian amphorae Dressel type 2-4.
Levels of rubble and chunks of a fallen wall seem to denote the collapse of the bathhouse and possible also the pilaster and perhaps elements of the mausoleum. This appears to have occurred in the fifth century or later.

A hiatus of some centuries seems to have been ended in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. Substantial levels of blackish soil, as elsewhere on the Vrina Plain, denote medieval activity.

The last phase of activity represents the build up of alluvium from the fourteenth century onwards plus the creation of the state farm in the 1960s. 

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