Antique Roman Grave Marker Uncovered in New Orleans Backyard Placed by US Soldier's Descendant

This old Roman tombstone just uncovered in a garden in New Orleans was evidently inherited and left there by the female descendant of a US soldier who was deployed in Italy in the World War II.

Via declarations that all but solved an international historical mystery, Erin Scott O’Brien shared with local media outlets that her grandfather, the veteran, displayed the 1,900-year-old item in a cabinet at his home in New Orleans’ Gentilly area prior to his passing in 1986.

O’Brien said she was unsure exactly how Paddock ended up with an item reported missing from an museum in Italy near Rome that misplaced the majority of its artifacts during World War II attacks. However Paddock served in Italy with the armed forces during the war, married his wife Adele there, and came home to New Orleans to build a profession as a singing instructor, O’Brien recounted.

It was fairly common for soldiers who were in Europe during the second world war to come home with keepsakes.

“I just thought it was a piece of art,” she stated. “I was unaware it was a millennia-old … historical object.”

In any event, what O’Brien initially thought was a plain marble tablet turned out to be passed down to her after Paddock’s death, and she set it as a yard ornament in the back yard of a home she purchased in the city’s Carrollton district in 2003. She neglected to remove the artifact with her when she sold the house in 2018 to a husband and wife who discovered the relic in March while cleaning up undergrowth.

The couple – anthropologist Daniella Santoro of the university and her husband, her spouse – realized the item had an engraving in Latin. They contacted academics who concluded the object was a headstone dedicated to a around 2nd-century Roman mariner and serviceman named Sextus Congenius Verus.

Moreover, the team learned, the grave marker corresponded to the description of one reported missing from the city museum of Civitavecchia, Italy, near where it had first discovered, as a participating scholar – the local university expert Dr. Gray – stated in a column released online Monday.

The couple have since turned the headstone over to the federal investigators, and efforts to repatriate the item to the Civitavecchia museum are ongoing so that facility can exhibit correctly it.

The granddaughter, living in the New Orleans community of nearby town, said she recalled her ancestor’s curious relic again after the publication had received coverage from the worldwide outlets. She said she reached out to journalists after a phone call from her ex-husband, who told her that he had read a report about the artifact that her ancestor had once possessed – and that it actually turned out to be a artifact from one of the world’s great classical civilizations.

“We were in shock about it,” the granddaughter expressed. “It’s astonishing how this all happened.”

Dr. Gray, for his part, said it was a comfort to learn how the ancient soldier’s tombstone traveled in the yard of a house more than 5,400 miles away from its original location.

“I assumed we would identify several possible carriers of the artifact,” the archaeologist stated. “I never imagined we would locate the precise individual – thus, it’s thrilling to learn the full story.”