New Orleans Couple Uncovers 1900-Year-Old Roman Tombstone in Their Backyard

How does a 1900-year-old Roman tombstone end up in New Orleans? That's what one couple set out to find out after discovering just that while weeding their backyard.

Daniella Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University, and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, were landscaping their backyard in the Carrollton neighborhood of New Orleans back in March when they uncovered flat marble slab with Latin inscriptions.

Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans

After contacting a team of archeologists, they were able to determine that the tomb belonged to a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus. A stone matching the one they'd found had previously been reported missing from the Civitavecchia museum in Italy.

While the couple, along with professionals in the field, are working to return the tombstone to its rightful location, it remains unclear how it made its way across the Atlantic to begin with.

According to their research, the Civitavecchia museum was badly damaged during World War II "and many of its collections lost," Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans reported.

"A 1954 inventory mentioning the inscription was compiled based on earlier documents rather than firsthand knowledge," the organization explained. "This made it all the more likely that the item was lost in the chaos after the war."

source https://www.mensjournal.com/news/new-orleans-couple-uncovers-1900-year-old-roman-tombstone-in-their-backyard