Post by BioScience.

Backyard Cleanup Uncovers 2,000-Year-Old Roman Tombstone That Traveled From WWII Italy A marble slab uncovered in a New Orleans backyard turned out to be a Roman tombstone dating from almost two millennia ago, sparking an international investigation that linked the artifact to a missing piece from Italy’s Civitavecchia museum. Anthropologists Daniella Santoro and Aaron Lorenz, aided by scholars from the University of New Orleans, the University of Innsbruck, and Tulma, translated the Latin inscription, which identifies the deceased as Sextus Congenius Verus, a Thracian sailor who served on the trireme Asclepius for 22 years. The same wording appears in the museum’s pre‑war catalog, confirming the stone’s provenance. The discovery highlights how wartime displacement of cultural objects can surface decades later in unexpected contexts, providing new evidence of post‑World‑II artifact movement across the Atlantic. Research traced the slab’s journey to a World War II veteran, Charles Paddock Jr., who likely acquired the stone in Italy and brought it home after the Allied liberation of Civitavecchia, where bombings destroyed the museum and scattered its collections. Oral histories from the Paddock family corroborated this chain of custody, filling a gap in the artifact’s provenance. The tombstone has now been repatriated to its rightful museum in Italy, and the case underscores the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in resolving provenance disputes. Ongoing work aims to document the exact mechanisms of the stone’s transfer, offering insights into the broader patterns of cultural heritage loss and recovery following armed conflict. Read full article: https://lnkd.in/dv57i2cv