Daniela Santoro and her husband were clearing brush in their New Orleans backyard in March when they found a mysterious object.

What they initially thought was a huge rock turned out to be the tombstone of a Roman soldier: Sextus Congenius Verus, a Thracian who served on the warship Asclepius before dying at the age of 42 – 1,900 years ago.

The couple eventually learned that the tombstone had disappeared from an Italian museum after it was bombed during World War II.

But Santoro didn’t know this story when she found the worn stone. At first she feared their house had been built on top of an unknown African-American cemetery — not uncommon for the Carrollton neighborhood, which has a long history of black residents. So he started asking neighbors and co-workers if they had ever encountered anything similar.

A neighbor referred her to Dr. Ryan Gray, a University of New Orleans archaeologist who works with the city’s Preservation Resource Center — the man New Orleanians go to when they think they’ve discovered something important.

“I often get questions from people about strange things they find in their yards,” he notes.

Gray reported that Santoro first called him on March 26, and he immediately determined that the tombstone was not the tombstone of an African-American or former slave.

“I knew the Latin on it was much more advanced than what I remembered from high school,” he said, so he contacted an Austrian colleague, an expert on the Roman era, who determined that it was probably the monument of Sextus.

Around the same time, Santoro—an anthropologist at Tulane University—sent a photo of her discovery to a classics professor who knew Latin.

Her colleague, Suzanne Lusnia, was stunned. “When I saw the photo, I said, ‘It looks like an authentic Roman inscription,'” says Lusnia, who teaches classical archaeology.

It seemed almost unbelievable, he added – especially since the email had been sent on April 1. But the inscription had all the characteristics of a Roman tombstone: densely placed letters, engraved in a manner characteristic of the period. The Latin translation confirmed this.

Lusnia explained that the inscription was essentially a biography of Sextus, detailing his race and military unit. When he ran the text into an online database of ancient European epitaphs, he discovered something shocking: the tombstone was listed as “missing” by the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia, a coastal town about 55 km west of Rome, or 8,700 km from New Orleans.

“I never would have expected to see something like this in a yard in New Orleans,” Lusnia adds.

Santoro agreed without a second thought that the tombstone should return to its “home,” Lusnia notes. So began months of research. By sheer coincidence, Lucnia had already planned a research trip to Rome a few months later.

During her visit to the Civitavecchia museum, she learned that the stele was part of an exhibition of tombstones discovered in the 1860s during construction work in the city, which revealed a necropolis of at least 21 soldiers, including Sextus.

The museum officials, Lusnia reports, were excited that he would return to his place.

But how the tombstone ended up from the museum to a garden is unclear.

The Civitavecchia museum had at least 21 tombstones in its possession, but less than half were saved after the bombing during World War II. And in the chaos that followed, record keeping was substandard. When the museum reopened in the 1970s, Sextus’ tombstone was missing.

“We don’t know if the tombstone was salvaged then or was later found in the ruins, but we suspected that given the history of the museum, it was somehow lost; someone took it and brought it to the US,” Lusnia said. “And we were right after all.”

She added that the previous owner of Santoro’s home contacted her when she saw the news to explain that her grandparents, an Italian woman and her husband from New Orleans who served in Italy during the war, had given her the headstone. The woman had placed the tombstone, unaware of its historical value, in the backyard before selling the house to Santoro.

An FBI agent in New Orleans went to Santoro’s home in May to pick up the stone, which is temporarily in the FBI’s Art Division, which is managing the complex process of repatriating the find. When reached for comment, the local FBI office said it was not making statements due to the government shutdown.

Roman tombstones like the one found by Santoro were very important in Roman culture. Lusnia explained that they were usually placed along footpaths so that passers-by would stop and remember the deceased. The ancient Romans believed that the memory of the dead ensured their afterlife.

“I think Sixth Congenius Verus will be very pleased to still be remembered so many centuries later,” Lusnia said.