How a Missing Ancient Roman Tombstone Ended up in a Louisiana Backyard

Earlier this year, a couple in New Orleans found a highly unlikely 1,800-year-old artifact in their backyard. After the story made headlines, the mystery was finally solved—we now (sort of) know how an ancient Roman tombstone ended up in Louisiana, of all places.

The intrigue began when Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, found a marble slab carved with inscriptions while working in the yard of their historic house in the Carrollton neighborhood. The inscriptions appeared to be in Latin.

Good thing it didn’t happen on Halloween—I would have immediately apologized to its ghost and reburied it. But the much more sensible Santoro contacted Ryan Gray, an anthropologist with the University of New Orleans. Together, they reached out to a number of other experts, including Tulane classicist Susann Lusnia.

An ancient Roman relic

And thus the first part of the mystery was solved: the marble slab was a Roman funerary inscription for a sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus from around the second century CE. The translated inscription is:

“To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe (natio) of the Bessi [i.e., a Thracian], (who) lived 42 years (and) served 22 in the military, on the trieme Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made (this) for him well deserving.â€

Low and behold, the city museum in Civitavecchia, Italy was missing an artifact just like it.

“We concluded that the case needed to proceed through the FBI’s Art Crime Team,†Gray explained in a Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans Preservation in Print report. “They helpfully agreed to pick up the stone and keep it in custody while the repatriation process began. With a legal path to restore the stone to its rightful owners in Italy, we came back to the question of how it ended up in a back yard in Carrollton.â€

The answer to that question came just three days after the center published its story, when Erin Scott O’Brien watched a news report about the ancient Roman tombstone discovered at her and her ex-husband’s former house—the one now owned by Santoro and Lorenz.

“We were in shock. We could not believe it,†O’Brien said in another Preservation in Print report. Thinking it was just an art piece, O’Brien had put the tablet in that backyard over two decades ago and then forgot about it by the time she sold the property in 2018. The artifact came from O’Brien grandparents.

A U.S. soldier in Italy

During World War II, O’Brien’s maternal grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr., was stationed in Italy, where he married his wife, Adele, in 1946. They ultimately returned to New Orleans, where they kept the tablet in a display case in their home. They passed away in the 1980s, and no one knew where it originated from—until now.

Lusnia went to the museum in Civitavecchia in person to confirm that that artifact was missing. During the war, allied bombing raids wrecked the museum, which lost most of its collections. It didn’t reopen until 1970.

Although we’ll probably never know the details of how the tombstone came into Paddock hands, O’Brien said that she is grateful it’s returning to its rightful home.