Daniella Santoro works as an anthropologist and understood fairly quickly that it was not an ordinary stone slab hiding under the weeds in the backyard.
It was a mysterious marble tablet with inscribed text in Latin, including the phrase "the spirits of the dead".
She contacted Susann Lusnia, a colleague and archaeologist, who announced that it was a tombstone. According to the inscription, the grave belonged to the Roman sailor Sextus Congenius Verus, who died at the age of 42 after more than two decades of service in the imperial fleet about 1,900 years ago.
It was originally found in the 1860s on the coast a few miles from Rome, but disappeared during World War II when the museum where it was kept was bombed by the Allies.
A previous owner of the house in New Orleans turned out to have inherited the stone from his grandparents. The grandfather had been stationed in Italy during the war and had probably taken it home with him.
The FBI and Italian authorities are now in dialogue about returning the artifact.
No one would probably be happier about the tablet's rediscovery than Sextus himself. Tombstones were important in Roman culture to preserve the memory of a person's life, even for ordinary citizens, says Susann Lusnia.
