Not from Home Depot.
(D. Ryan Gray/PRCNO)
If you've ever tried to overhaul a garden, you know you're bound to find broken bits of pottery and long-forgotten statuary swallowed by vines – but for one couple, that imitation of archaeological discovery turned into the real thing.
At first glance, the marble slab etched in Latin – including the phrase "spirits of the dead" – might have looked like a mass-produced facsimile designed to lend a garden a little decorative gravitas.
But for anthropologist Daniella Santoro, who lives with her husband Aaron Lopez in a historic home in New Orleans' Carrollton neighborhood, the object – found half-buried in the undergrowth – set off some spidey senses. For a moment, she feared they might have uncovered an old grave.
"The fact that it was in Latin that really just gave us pause, right?" Santoro told the Associated Press. "I mean, you see something like that and you say, 'Okay, this is not an ordinary thing.'"
Instead of ignoring the instinct, Santoro reached out to experts. Among those who examined the inscription were archaeologist Susann Lusnia of Tulane University and anthropologist D. Ryan Gray of the University of New Orleans, who shared the find with other colleagues.
It didn't take long for the researchers to recognize what the couple had found.
The Latin text begins Dis Manibus – "to the spirits of the dead" – a common dedication on Roman funerary tablets. In Roman funerary practice, Dis Manibus was a standard dedication to the spirits of the departed, often carved at the top of tombstones. Thousands of such inscriptions survive across the former Roman Empire.
Further translation revealed that the stone commemorated a Roman soldier, a Thracian named Sextus Congenius Verus. Commissioned by his heirs, Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, the grave marker records that he died at 42, after 22 years of military service – some 1,900 years before Santoro and Lopez found his grave marker in an overgrown garden, half a world away.
Intriguingly, this was not the first record of the stone. Early in the 20th century, it had been documented as part of the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia, Italy, a port town where the grave marker once stood in a small cemetery.
The museum was heavily damaged during Allied bombing in 1943 and 1944, and numerous artifacts were lost or displaced. Across Europe, wartime bombing and looting displaced countless cultural artifacts, many of which remain unaccounted for decades later.
The grave marker was among those later listed as missing. Its exact measurements, as recorded by the museum, matched those of the tablet found in Santoro and Lopez's garden.
Exactly how the stone traveled from wartime Italy to suburban Louisiana remained an equally fascinating saga. According to Erin Scott O'Brien, the Carrollton house's former owner, the tablet had been on display in a cabinet containing other heirlooms in the Gentilly house of her grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr., a soldier stationed in Italy during WWII.
Paddock Jr. and his wife died in the 1980s; when O'Brien moved into the home in the early 2000s, her mother gifted her the stone.
"We planted a tree and said this is the start of our new house. Let's put it outside in our garden," O'Brien told Preservation in Print. "I just thought it was a piece of art. I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old relic."
More than 80 years have passed since the museum that once held the relic was devastated by war, and the principal players in the drama are dead. It's likely we'll never know the true story of how Paddock came into possession of the stone, but perhaps what really matters is that it's finally returning home – to the land of the empire Sextus Congenius Verus so faithfully served.
The FBI's Art Crime Team is coordinating its repatriation to the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia.
The birth of modern Man
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