Cool Finds

Why Was This Ancient Roman Soldier’s Gravestone Hidden in a Louisiana Backyard? Archaeologists Solved the Mystery—and Helped Return the Artifact to Italy

The funerary marker, which surfaced on a New Orleans property last year, once belonged to a Roman soldier who died nearly 2,000 years ago. Officials repatriated the stone in a recent ceremony in Rome

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

May 19, 2026 2:30 p.m.

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A married couple was clearing weeds last year when they stumbled across a strange marble slab behind their New Orleans home. Hidden beneath overgrown vines, the stone featured a Latin engraving. Was it possible, they wondered, that their house had been built over an abandoned cemetery?

Scholars assured them that the property wasn’t a cemetery—but the marble artifact was, indeed, a gravestone. It had been made for a Roman soldier who died around the second century C.E., and it had been missing from a museum in Civitavecchia, Italy, for decades.

Now, the ancient funerary marker has finally returned to its home country, according to a statement from FBI New Orleans. American officials repatriated it along with a trove of more than 300 other artifacts during a ceremony in Rome on April 29.

“When stolen art returns, both nations benefit,” Tilman Fertitta, the American ambassador to Italy, said at the event, per the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo. “Italy regains its history, and the United States reaffirms its commitment to justice and cultural preservation.”

The artifacts included a head of Alexander the Great carved in the first century C.E., a satyr looted from Herculaneum, two Egyptian statues, Byzantine coins and Greek ceramics. They had been recovered through collaborations between Italian officials and American agencies.

The Roman grave marker was at the center of a mystery that started in early 2025, when Daniella Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University, and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, found it on their property in New Orleans’ historic Carrollton neighborhood. Santoro then consulted with D. Ryan Gray, an archaeologist at the University of New Orleans who works with the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans (PRC).

“As an archaeologist, I often get questions from the public about odd things that show up during construction or landscaping projects around the city,” Gray wrote in the PRC’s magazine Preservation in Print in October 2025. “Still, it is rare for those routine questions to become truly international in scope.”

Gray shared photos of the gravestone with Harald Stadler, an archaeologist at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, who also sent them to his brother, a Latin instructor. Around the same time, Santoro contacted Susann Lusnia, a classical archaeologist at Tulane University.

“When I looked at the image, I was like, ‘This looks like a genuine Roman inscription,’” Lusnia told the Washington Post’s Ben Brasch last year. “I would never have expected to see anything like this in a backyard in New Orleans.”

The engraving was a funerary inscription for a man named Sextus Congenius Verus, a 42-year-old sailor who had served for 22 years on a ship called the Asclepius.

The researchers realized that a stone matching this description was listed as missing from the National Archaeological Museum in Civitavecchia, Italy. Santoro and the team decided that the artifact should return to Italy, so they handed it over to the FBI’s Art Crime Team.

The researchers weren’t sure how the gravestone arrived in America, though they knew that the Allies bombed the area during World War II, leaving the museum devastated. Perhaps, they theorized, it was “lost in the chaos after the war,” Gray wrote. “We may never know exactly how Sextus Congenius Verus’ tombstone ended up in New Orleans.”

But the solution to the mystery was close at hand. As news of the discovery circulated in late 2025, Erin Scott O’Brien got a call from her ex-husband. Years ago, they had owned the house in New Orleans together.

When O’Brien read the story, she recognized the stone, which had belonged to her grandparents. Her grandfather, Charles Paddock, met her grandmother, Adele, an Italian artist, while serving in Italy during World War II. They had the stone on display in their house, and after they died, it eventually passed to O’Brien, who’d never known its origins. She placed it in her garden, and by the time she sold the house in 2018, she’d forgotten about it.

“I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old relic,” she told WWL-TV’s Meg Farris. “It’s wonderful that it’s going back to where it belongs.”

Nobody knows how O’Brien’s grandparents acquired the stone—“whether they bought it or if he, perhaps, took it as a souvenir during the war,” wrote Preservation in Print’s Danny Monteverde last year. Living family members don’t remember them talking about it.

The recent repatriation ceremony marked roughly 25 years since the United States and Italy signed an agreement to fight the trafficking of cultural artifacts. It’s been renewed several times since, most recently in December.

“The agreement places import restrictions on Italian antiquities to disrupt the financing of criminal organizations as well as ensure Americans have access to Italian antiquities and archaeological sites for educational, cultural and scientific purposes,” FBI New Orleans says in the statement.

Now that the gravestone is back in Italy, it will eventually return to the National Archaeological Museum in Civitavecchia, a coastal city about 40 miles from the center of ancient Rome. This summer, Gray will travel to Italy with a group of students, who will be conducting an archaeological dig about an hour from the museum. They’re hoping to see the artifact for themselves.

“We’re really excited that we’re going to be able to bring some of our New Orleans people to see where it’s supposed to be,” Gray tells the Times-Picayune’s Poet Wolfe.

Ellen Wexler | | Read More

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.