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.
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…