Ancient Roman Grave Marker Found in NOLA Backyard Deposited by American Serviceman's Heir

This ancient Roman memorial stone newly found in a lawn in New Orleans was evidently received and left there by the granddaughter of a military man who served in Italy during the World War II.

Through comments that all but solved an international historical mystery, Erin Scott O’Brien shared with area journalists that her ancestor, her grandfather, kept the 1,900-year-old item in a display case at his home in New Orleans’ Gentilly district until he died in 1986.

She explained she was uncertain precisely how the soldier ended up with an object reported missing from an Rome-area institution near Rome that had destroyed most of its collection during wartime air raids. However her grandfather was stationed in Italy with the US army in that period, tied the knot with Adele there, and came home to New Orleans to work as a singing instructor, she recalled.

It happened regularly for soldiers who were in Europe throughout the global conflict to return with keepsakes.

“I believed it was merely artwork,” she stated. “I didn’t realize it was an ancient … artifact.”

Anyway, what she first believed was a unremarkable marble piece was eventually handed down to her after her grandfather’s passing, and she placed it down as a garden decoration in the rear area of a home she acquired in the city’s Carrollton area in 2003. The heir overlooked to remove the artifact with her when she moved out in 2018 to a pair who uncovered the stone in March while cleaning up brush.

The husband and wife – scholar the anthropologist of the academic institution and her husband, her spouse – recognized the object had an inscription in the Latin language. They sought advice from researchers who concluded the item was a grave marker dedicated to a approximately ancient Roman mariner and serviceman named the Roman individual.

Additionally, the group discovered, the tombstone fit the description of one listed as lost from the city museum of the Italian city, near where it had first discovered, as an involved researcher – the local university specialist D Ryan Gray – wrote in a column published online earlier this week.

Santoro and Lorenz have since handed over the artifact to the federal investigators, and attempts to repatriate the item to the Civitavecchia museum are ongoing so that museum can exhibit correctly it.

She, now located in the New Orleans community of Metairie, said she remembered her grandfather’s strange stone again after the archaeologist’s article had been reported from the global press. She said she got in touch with journalists after a discussion from her previous partner, who told her that he had come across a report about the object that her grandpa had once had – and that it truly was to be a item from one of the planet’s ancient cultures.

“We were in shock about it,” O’Brien said. “It’s astonishing how this all happened.”

Dr. Gray, for his part, said it was a relief to learn how Congenius Verus’s headstone traveled behind a residence more than a great distance away from Civitavecchia.

“I assumed we would identify several possible carriers of the artifact,” Dr. Gray commented. “I didn’t really expect to actually find the actual person – so it’s pretty exciting to know how it ended up here.”