A New Orleans couple stumbled onto something far older than their house while clearing an overgrown backyard: a Latin-inscribed marble slab that turned out to be a 1,900-year-old Roman funerary marker. The discovery set off a chain of events involving a Tulane University classicist, the FBI, and a family connection stretching back to World War II. It raised sharp questions about how ancient artifacts end up in American gardens and who has the right to keep them.
A Latin Slab Hidden in Plain Sight
The homeowners were doing routine yard work when they noticed the weathered stone half-buried in vegetation. Carved into its surface was a Latin inscription that clearly did not belong in a Louisiana backyard. They contacted scholars at Tulane University, where classicist Susann Lusnia examined the find and, according to an Associated Press account, identified the slab as a Roman funerary marker dating back roughly 1,900 years. The inscription commemorated a man named Sextus Congenius Verus, whom Lusnia determined was a first-century Roman sailor and soldier, the kind of figure usually known only from scattered inscriptions and military records.
Lusnia’s identification did not rest on the inscription alone. She matched the New Orleans slab to a fragment already documented in an early‑20th‑century Latin source, a scholarly catalog of Roman inscriptions that had recorded the text decades before the Second World War. That match gave the find an unusual degree of academic certainty: the stone was not a replica or a curiosity shop knockoff but a genuine artifact that had been recorded, lost, and then rediscovered far from its origin. The question that followed was obvious. How did a nearly two‑millennia‑old Roman gravestone travel from the ancient world to a residential lot in New Orleans?
A Soldier’s Souvenir From World War II
The answer traces back to the Second World War and a U.S. soldier named Charles Paddock Jr. According to reporting that pieced together the artifact’s chain of custody, Paddock likely acquired the marble slab during the conflict, possibly in the aftermath of bombing that damaged a French museum housing Roman‑era collections. Wartime looting and informal acquisition of cultural objects by Allied troops were widespread during that period, and artifacts ranging from paintings to ancient stonework ended up in American households as personal keepsakes. Paddock brought the stone home to New Orleans, where it remained in his family’s possession for decades, folded into family lore but without clear documentation of how it had left Europe.
The slab eventually passed to Paddock’s granddaughter, Erin Scott O’Brien, who placed it in the garden of a New Orleans property. When O’Brien later moved out, the stone stayed behind, left in the yard like an abandoned garden ornament. The new homeowners had no idea what it was or that it might have once stood in a Roman cemetery. For years the marker sat unrecognized, slowly being swallowed by plant growth, until the couple’s cleanup effort brought it back to light. That gap in knowledge, between a family heirloom and an anonymous rock in someone else’s yard, is what allowed a genuine Roman artifact to remain hidden in a residential neighborhood for so long, its original funerary purpose obscured by time and distance.
FBI Art Crime Team Takes Custody
Once Lusnia confirmed the slab’s age and identity, the discovery moved from an academic puzzle into a law‑enforcement matter. The find was reported to authorities, and the FBI Art Crime Team, a specialized unit that the bureau itself has highlighted in its list of major art‑theft investigations, took custody of the artifact. The team has handled cases involving everything from looted antiquities to stolen masterworks, and its involvement signaled that federal authorities were treating the marble slab as more than a curiosity. The stone had been missing from scholarly records for decades, and its wartime acquisition raised the possibility that it was removed from a museum collection without authorization rather than through any formal transfer.
The FBI’s seizure also put the artifact on a potential path toward repatriation. Italy has aggressively pursued the return of Roman‑era objects from foreign collections in recent years, and a funerary marker with a documented provenance gap during wartime fits squarely within the kind of case that can trigger international recovery claims. The marker had been listed as lost in academic catalogs, and, as the Washington Post reported, the artifact had effectively been classified as missing before its New Orleans discovery. That strengthens the argument that it was improperly taken rather than legally sold or gifted. For the homeowners who found it, the backyard cleanup turned into an encounter with federal agents and an international cultural dispute they never anticipated, raising the stakes far beyond a neighborhood oddity.
Wartime Acquisition and the Ownership Debate
The Paddock family’s story is far from unique. Thousands of cultural objects made their way into American homes during and after World War II, carried by soldiers who saw them as souvenirs rather than protected heritage. Some of those objects were genuinely rescued from destruction: Allied troops sometimes salvaged artifacts from bombed‑out buildings that would otherwise have been lost entirely. Others were taken from museums, churches, and private homes under chaotic conditions that blurred the line between rescue and theft. That history creates an uncomfortable tension: the same act that preserved an object can also constitute its unlawful removal, depending on whether the original institution or nation consented to the artifact’s departure and whether any effort was made to document its new whereabouts.
In this case, the connection to a museum bombing complicates any simple narrative about right and wrong. If Paddock picked the stone from rubble that would have been cleared and discarded, his acquisition may have inadvertently saved a 1,900‑year‑old record of Sextus Congenius Verus from permanent loss. But the stone was cataloged in scholarly literature, meaning it had recognized cultural and scientific value that its removal from institutional care disrupted. The fact that it spent decades as a garden decoration, its significance unknown even to the family that inherited it, illustrates how quickly context and meaning can drain away from an artifact once it leaves the hands of specialists. A Roman soldier’s memorial became, for all practical purposes, a stepping stone, its Latin inscription exposed to weather, lawn tools, and the slow erasure of casual use.
What the Find Reveals About Hidden Heritage
Most coverage of the New Orleans gravestone has focused on its improbable journey across continents and centuries, but the episode also highlights how much cultural heritage may be hiding in plain sight. Family basements, attics, and gardens can harbor objects whose origins were never fully explained or whose stories have faded with each generation. In the mid‑20th century, when wartime souvenirs were treated as personal mementos rather than potential evidence of cultural loss, few people imagined that a stone or painting carried home by a relative might one day draw the attention of federal agents or foreign governments. The New Orleans slab shows how those private keepsakes can, decades later, collide with evolving standards about provenance, restitution, and historical responsibility.
The rediscovery of Sextus Congenius Verus’s marker also underscores the role of local curiosity and academic expertise in reconnecting displaced artifacts with their pasts. Without homeowners willing to ask questions, and without a nearby scholar able to read an unfamiliar inscription, the stone might have remained just another odd feature in a backyard. Instead, it became a case study in the afterlife of antiquities: how they move, how they are forgotten, and how they sometimes resurface in the most unlikely places. As debates over repatriation and wartime spoils continue, the New Orleans gravestone stands as a reminder that the boundaries between personal property and shared heritage are often drawn long after the objects themselves have begun their journeys—and that even a neglected garden can hold a fragment of the ancient world waiting to be recognized.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
