Long-lost ancient Roman artifact reappears in a New Orleans backyard

A New Orleans family cleaning up their overgrown backyard made an extremely unusual find: Under the weeds was a mysterious marble tablet with Latin characters that included the phrase "spirits of the dead."

NEW ORLEANS — A New Orleans family cleaning up their overgrown backyard made an extremely unusual find: Under the weeds was a mysterious marble tablet with Latin characters that included the phrase "spirits of the dead."

"The fact that it was in Latin that really just gave us pause, right?" said Daniella Santoro, a Tulane University anthropologist. "I mean, you see something like that and you say, 'OK, this is not an ordinary thing.'"

Intrigued and slightly alarmed, Santoro reached out to her classical archaeologist colleague Susann Lusnia, who quickly realized that the slab was the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus.

"When I first saw the image that Daniella sent me, it really did send a shiver up my spine because I was just floored," Lusnia said.

Further sleuthing by Lusnia revealed the tablet had been missing from an Italian museum for decades.