Vintage Roman Headstone Uncovered in NOLA Garden Deposited by US Soldier's Heir

This historic Roman memorial stone newly found in a garden in New Orleans appears to have been inherited and abandoned there by the female descendant of a American serviceman who was deployed in Italy in the global conflict.

Through comments that all but solved an international historical mystery, Erin Scott O’Brien informed area journalists that her ancestor, Charles Paddock Jr, displayed the ancient relic in a display case at his home in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood prior to his passing in 1986.

O’Brien said she was not sure precisely how the soldier came to possess an item reported missing from an museum in Italy near Rome that had destroyed a large part of its holdings amid second world war bombing. Yet the soldier fought in Italy with the US army in that period, tied the knot with Adele there, and went back to New Orleans to work as a vocal coach, she recalled.

It was fairly common for soldiers who served in Europe during the second world war to bring back souvenirs.

“I believed it was merely artwork,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t realize it was an ancient … artifact.”

In any event, what the heir originally assumed was a plain marble tablet turned out to be inherited to her after the veteran’s demise, and she set it as a yard ornament in the garden of a home she bought 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 pair who found the object in March while removing undergrowth.

The couple – scholar Daniella Santoro of the university and her husband, Aaron Lorenz – understood the item had an engraving in ancient Latin. They contacted researchers who established the artifact was a headstone honoring a around ancient Roman sailor and military member named the Roman individual.

Additionally, the researchers learned, the tombstone corresponded to the account of one documented as absent from the city museum of the Italian city, near where it had originally been found, as one of the consulting academics – the local university archaeologist D Ryan Gray – stated in a column released online earlier this week.

The homeowners have since turned the headstone over to the FBI’s art crime team, and efforts to return the relic to the Civitavecchia museum are ongoing so that institution can exhibit correctly it.

O’Brien, who resides in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, said she thought about her grandpa’s unusual artifact again after the archaeologist’s article had received coverage from the international news media. She said she contacted a news outlet after a conversation from her previous partner, who told her that he had read a article about the item that her grandfather had once possessed – and that it in fact proved to be a artifact from one of the history’s renowned empires.

“We were in shock about it,” she commented. “It’s astonishing how this all happened.”

The archaeologist, however, said it was a comfort to learn how Congenius Verus’s tombstone made its way in the yard of a home more than 5,400 miles away from Civitavecchia.

“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.”