The first story was a large and tall fortified wall with a single door and only small windows near the top to light the interior, forum level rooms.

To illustrate the complexity of the building, Filippo Coarelli has stated that a particular annex of the Aerarium Saturni was constructed specifically to house metal ingots and minted Republican coins.

The structure was considered such an enduring masterpiece of late Republican architecture, that a funerary inscription for the architect, commissioned by Lutatius Catalus, was created and preserved in a courtyard of the hospital of the Fatebenefatelli, on Tiber island.

Purcell draws our attention to the lack of archaeological and epigraphic knowledge on tabularia, suggesting that these inscriptions were not intended to be grandiose in scope, nor did they name the building,[6]: 140  which further reflects the prevailing credulity of the structure in question.

Purcell's reference to the archaeological research conducted by Theodor Mommsen aligns with his argument and likely indicates that historians must set aside such misunderstandings reflected in the literary sources.

Purcell's assessment of the epigraphic evidence once found within the structure in question reaffirms the following view, long held by academics, that the Tabularium is insufficiently documented and the product of scholarly inertia.

An article by Pier Luigi Tucci (2005) radically changed the way historians and archaeologists alike would view the Tabularium, questioning the very identification of the structure and its function.

In examining the architectural link between the rooms of the substructure and that of a south-western building, Tucci, in accordance with historians before him, could identify the remnants of an extension of the aerarium, or treasury, which was housed in the Temple of Saturn.

Subsequently, in correlation with the accounts of Livy (7.28.4–6), Ovid (Fasti 6.183–185) and Cicero (De domo 38.101), Tucci draws attention to a clear association between the location of this mint, and that of the Temple of Juno Moneta.

As a result, Tucci called into question both the identification and function of the so-called Tabularium, in his attempt to overturn a theory that had been taken for historical fact since the 15th century AD.

[7][8] Fillipo Coarelli (2010) uses the arguments and findings of Nicholas Purcell (1993), Henner von Hesberg (1995) and Pier Luigi Tucci (2005) to propose an alternative understanding of the function of the Tabularium.

It is important to note that prior these studies, research and scholarship of the Tabularium was primarily saturated by the Richard Delbrück's Hellenistische Bauten in Latium, published in 1875.

However, writing in 2010, Coarelli has had access to a wider range of both archaeological and written sources that probe a deeper inquest in to traditional discourses that cloud our conception of the function and meaning of the Tabularium.