The couple hadn’t known how the artifact made its way to their property in New Orleans. But after their story went viral, a former owner of the home came forward with new information about the object

Thanks to viral news coverage, experts are unraveling the mystery of how an ancient Roman soldier’s gravestone ended up in the garden of a New Orleans home.

The untangling began when Erin Scott O’Brien received a phone call from her ex-husband earlier this month. “I just saw this news story; you are not going to believe it,” he said, according to WWL-TV’s Meg Farris. “Just watch and call me back.”

The news story was about the home the couple had previously owned together—a shotgun house in New Orleans’ historic Carrollton neighborhood. O’Brien also recognized the article’s focus: a stone engraved in Latin, which she had inherited from her grandfather and used as garden decor. She’d assumed it was simply a collectible. But according to the news coverage, it was actually a 1,900-year-old grave marker for a Roman soldier.

Last spring, the house’s current owners—Daniella Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University, and her husband, Aaron Lorenz—found the stone while tending their garden. Intrigued, Santoro contacted the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans (PRC) and got in touch with D. Ryan Gray, an archaeologist at the University of New Orleans.

Daniella Santoro’s house in New Orleans’ Carrollton neighborhood was previously owned by Erin Scott O’Brien. D. Ryan Gray

“The fact that it was in Latin—that really just gave us pause, right?” Santoro tells the Associated Press’ Jack Brook. “I mean, you see something like that and you say, ‘OK, this is not an ordinary thing.’”

The investigation began. As Gray wrote in the PRC’s magazine Preservation in Print, he and Santoro enlisted the help of Harald Stadler, an archaeologist at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, and Susann S. Lusnia, a classicist at Tulane. According to the inscription, the stone was a grave marker for Sextus Congenius Verus, a Thracian who’d served 22 years in the Roman navy aboard a trireme, or a warship propelled by oars.

Quick fact: What did the grave marker’s inscription say?

According to the tablet, Sextus Congenius Verus was a 42-year-old “soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis” who served on a ship called Asclepius.

Lusnia traced the piece back to the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia in Italy. Located in a port city northwest of Rome, the museum had been “pretty much destroyed” by Allied bombing during World War II, Lusnia tells the AP. She spoke to the museum’s staff in person, and they confirmed the one-square-foot stone tablet was missing from the collections.

As Gray wrote, the grave marker was likely “lost in the chaos after the war.” After liberating Rome, American soldiers passed through Civitavecchia. Researchers theorized that an American soldier found the gravestone and brought it home as a souvenir. As it turns out, they may have been right.

O’Brien’s grandfather was Master Sergeant Charles E. Paddock, who was stationed in Italy during World War II. There, Paddock married Adele Vincenza Paoli, an Italian artist, in 1946. The couple eventually settled in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood, and Paddock taught music at Loyola University New Orleans.

O’Brien’s uncle, Charlie, tells WWL-TV that he grew up seeing the Latin-inscribed stone, which was on display in a cabinet in the Gentilly home, but his family never talked about the piece’s origins. When Charles and Adele Paddock died in the 1980s, the gravestone was passed down to O’Brien’s mom, who later passed it to O’Brien.

“I just thought it was a piece of art,” O’Brien tells Preservation in Print’s Danny Monteverde. “I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old relic.”

When O’Brien and her ex-husband bought a house in Carrollton in 2004, they planted a tree to mark the occasion—and they placed the stone nearby, according to WWL-TV. When they sold the house in 2018, they’d forgotten about the engraved stone in the yard.

Santoro and the team of researchers handed the artifact over to the FBI’s Art Crime Team, which will repatriate it to Civitavecchia. Nobody knows exactly how the Paddocks acquired the stone, but O’Brien is glad that it’s on its way to Italy.

“It’s amazing,” she tells Preservation in Print. “It’s wonderful that it’s going back to where it belongs.”