"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, 'Okay, 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.