Even if you’ve never seen an episode of Antiques Roadshow, daydreaming about discovering a valuable or historically significant object in the basement or at a local Goodwill is a common enough fantasy. Something similar occurred earlier this year to an unsuspecting couple in New Orleans.
In March, Daniella Santoro and Aaron Lorenz were doing some yard work at their home when they discovered a mysterious marble headstone with a Latin inscription hidden in the underbrush, according to a report in the Guardian. The couple contacted University of New Orleans archaeologist D. Ryan Gray, who wrote about the discovery in great detail for the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, a local organization focused on the city’s historic architecture and cultural identity.
Gray’s research typically focuses on the material culture of New Orleans (for example, sites related to Mother Catherine Seals’s Temple of the Innocent Blood), but it was through a pre-existing partnership with the University of Innsbruck in Austria to study WWII aircraft crash sites that Gray was able to start mapping out the potential history of Santoro and Lorenz’s headstone, piecing together how this 2nd-century object might have made its way to the couple’s back yard.
“It is rare,” Gray wrote for the PRCNO, for “routine questions to become truly international in scope and involve an interdisciplinary team of scholars, museum professionals and the FBI.”
Gray shared a photo with a colleague in Innsbruck, who shared it with his brother, who is a Latin scholar; at the same time, Santoro shared it with one of her colleagues in Tulane’s classics department. Both confirmed that the inscription on the headstone was for a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus. They were then able to trace the inscription to a missing object that had once been in the collection of a museum in Civitavecchia, a port city northwest of Rome.
The initial working theory was that someone local who served in the US Army or Navy brought the slab back to New Orleans as a souvenir some time after World War II. Gray, Santoro, and their colleagues—most notably Susann Lusnia, the Tulane classics professor who translated the slab and eventually traveled to Civitavecchia—have dug deep into census and property records to try and identify who the “culprit” might be. So far they have made lots of progress, all of which is detailed in page-turning fashion in Gray’s PRNCO article, narrowing the source of the initial “looting” to someone serving in the 34th division of the Fifth Army, which spent time in Civitavecchia after liberating Rome in 1944. How the headstone made its way to Santoro and Lorenz’s specific backyard is anyone’s guess.
In the meantime, the researchers are in the process of repatriating the mysterious stone. The repatriation process, however, is not as straightforward as simply returning the marble slab to Italy. As Gray explains it, the FBI’s Art Crime Team is now involved, and will keep the headstone until it can formally be repatriated to its rightful owner.
