Roman Find in New Orleans – The Weird Side of the Internet

Roman Find in New Orleans – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I spent a lot of time as a kid looking for buried treasure. I was a weird kid, what can I say? And I say ‘weird’ because I would dig in places that no one would ever believe held treasure, like the side of a highway. I was also a brave and impulsive kid. So I’d dig against hard-packed dirt with whatever instrument I could find, usually a stick. I wasn’t looking for gold or silver, just for something historical.

Tulane University anthropologist Daniella Santoro went digging in her back yard to clear a garden overgrown since she’d bought the house in 2018. And she found what I would’ve killed to have found: a one-foot square tablet with Latin engraved into it. A grave marker for a lifelong sailor in the Roman Navy named Sextus Congenius Verus.

Now I know that some of you are going to have the little tickle in your nose that you get when you come across a juicy conspiracy. I mean, dig up a two-thousand year old Roman grave marker in a New Orleans backyard and you might think that he was buried there, and our “first Europeans to settle” thing goes right out the window.

But alas, such a mystery is not meant to be. A man was stationed in World War Two and stole the marker from a bombed out museum in Italy. So the tablet’s been in NOLA for about seventy years.
Did you really think there’s anything in a three-hundred plus year old city that hasn’t been bulldozed over at some point? Surely someone would have found it by now. And way to go, kicking the tires of that property purchase. There just as easily been a body dump in that garden. And this is New Orleans. There might have been a body dump at some point.

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