Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenzo, were doing yardwork at their New Orleans home in March when he found a marble slab beneath a lemon tree, hidden under a tangle of thick vines and dirt.

Santoro heard Lorenzo call for her: “You’ve got to come see this.”

The couple looked closely at the stone and noticed Latin letters carved across it. Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University, was “immediately fascinated” by the discovery, imagining that it was a grave marker left behind by the home's previous owners for a family member.

She reached out to colleagues in Latin and classical studies, who suggested the slab might be something far more unlikely — an authentic Roman tombstone.

They were skeptical, but it turned out that the improbable theory was correct. The stone was a

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