Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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A nearly 2,000-year-old tombstone of a Roman sailor has been discovered in the backyard of a New Orleans home.
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The Latin inscription on the grave marker prompted a search for the origin of the marble stone.
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Local news coverage of the discovery led to the discovery of how the ancient piece crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.
The discovery of a nearly 2,000-year-old gravestone of a Roman sailor wasn’t so much a dig as it was a yard cleanup at a New Orleans home.
When Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, began clearing brush from their backyard, they discovered a marble slab with what appeared to be a Latin inscription carved into it. In a strange turn of events, the slab turned out to be the grave marker of a Roman military sailor, originally housed in an Italian museum. How it got 5,250 miles away is quite a journey.
When Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University and the owner of the historic house on Cambronne Street in New Orleans’ Carrollton neighborhood, initially found the plaque, she thought it might have come from one of the city’s historic cemeteries. She contacted D. Ryan Gray, professor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans.
“I never feel like I’ve seen them all,” Gray wrote on the New Orleans Conservation Resource Center’s website. “There are always surprises and new mysteries to solve.”
These new mysteries don’t often come with international plots that include World War II, the garden setting, and the FBI
With no cemeteries nearby, Gray enlisted the help of a colleague at the University of Innsbruck and researchers at Tulane to decipher the Latin. They independently concluded that the stone contained a Roman funerary inscription for a sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus.
Inscription from the 2nd century AD. it read: “To the spirits of the dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the Praetorian fleet Misenensis, of the Bessi tribe. [of Thrace](who) lived 42 years (and) served 22 in the army, in the trireme [warship] Asclepius Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, did (this) for him, well deserved.”
More shocking: this inscription was already known in the world of anthropology. “In fact, a stone matching the exact description was missing from the city museum in Civitavecchia, Italy, close to where it had originally been found,” Gray said. “It was a bit of a surprise and changed the scope of our investigations.”
After the backyard discovery and identification, the FBI’s Crime Art Squad became involved, lifting the foot-wide stone and holding it in custody while the repatriation process began to return the grave marker back to its original home.
Getting the stone back to the Italian museum was one thing, but figuring out how it got to New Orleans was another.
Gray began investigating the house’s 20th-century owners, when the house remained in the same family for much of the 1900s. Thanks to the U.S. Census, Gray deduced that Frank Simon bought the house for his family in 1909 while working at a wholesale shoe company. His daughters, who worked as seamstresses, later owned the house. But those facts provided no clues as to how a stone moved from Italy to Louisiana.
With that impasse, Gray turned to his next-door neighbor, a U.S. Navy veteran who served in World War II. And this was a non-starter, showing that he deployed to the Pacific and was never stationed in Italy.
Susann Lusnia, associate professor of classical studies at Tulane, took the search to Italy, where she was already planning a summer research stint. He met with staff and curators at the city’s museum and learned that the tombstone’s original site, located northwest of Rome, was a major port for the Roman Empire and remained a port into the 20s.th century. Allied bombing in 1943 and 1944 hit the city in World War II, and the museum was destroyed and the collections lost.
Lusnia discovered that the marker was probably lost in the chaos after the war and confirmed that the 34th the US Fifth Army division traveled through the city after the liberation of Rome, with units remaining in the area. At the time, Gray thought there must be a connection between the World War II soldiers and the slab, but he had no way to research so many names.
Then the crowdsourcing finished the job. As local news picked up the story, a former Cambronne Street homeowner heard about the mysterious headstone and immediately made the connection, remembering that she had placed the stone in the garden while planting a tree in her new home two decades ago.
“I thought it was a work of art,” said Erin Scott O’Brien Preservation in print. “I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old relic.”
O’Brien’s grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr., served in the U.S. Army during World War II, stationed for a time in Italy. He returned to New Orleans in 1946 with his new wife, Adele, whom he had met in Italy. Charles taught at Loyola University, and the tablet in question sat in a cabinet in his house on Baccich Street. But with both grandparents passing in the 1980s, O’Brien didn’t know its significance. She came up with what she thought was a decorative piece and added it to her backyard decor over two decades ago.
“I really thought we’d have our list of possible people they could have gotten here through,” Gray said. “I didn’t expect to find the real person, so it’s quite interesting to know how it got here.”
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