Long before pressed pennies and postcards, a resident of Londinium (Roman London) received a witty souvenir from the empire’s capital. An iron stylus—a writing implement used to press letters into wax or clay tablets—dating to about A.D. 70, unearthed from a trash dump along a lost tributary of the Thames, bears a personal message in Latin etched along its sides:

I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift 

with a sharp point that you may remember me. 

I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able (to give) 

as generously as the way is long (and) as my purse is empty. 

In the decades following the conquest of Britain, Londinium experienced an influx of Roman soldiers and merchants, who brought with them goods from all across the Roman world. “This stylus is a clear demonstration of a personal connection between someone in Londinium, which lay close to the edge of the empire, and someone who had been to Rome, which lay at its heart,” says Museum of London Archaeology senior finds specialist Michael Marshall. “The gift’s recipient, or a friend or family member, may have been the owner of this stylus.”

Roadwork at Veyre-Monton in central France has revealed the first known megalithic site in the region. There, archaeologists from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) have uncovered evidence of cult activity spanning thousands of years, from the Neolithic period through the Bronze Age. They identified 30 menhirs, or monoliths, arranged from largest to smallest in a 500-foot-long line oriented precisely north to south. Most of the menhirs are made of local basalt and undecorated, but a single limestone example was sculpted to resemble a person, with two small breasts and an engraved chevron that might depict forearms.

At some point all the menhirs were intentionally buried, as was an adjacent four-sided stone cairn, measuring 46 feet long and 21 feet wide, that surrounded the tomb of a tall man. Despite the site’s long use, the motivations behind the monuments’ removal from the landscape are unknown. “It’s very tempting to interpret this as the result of a change in beliefs,” says INRAP archaeologist Ivy Thomson, “but it may also be linked to the disgrace of the community in control of the site, or even something more trivial.”

Humans and animals have traversed the icy landscape of Norway’s Jotunheimen Mountains for thousands of years. Now, melting ice patches at a site in northern Oppland County are exposing evidence of these often-treacherous crossings. A team of archaeologists led by Espen Finstad of the Secrets of the Ice Project has recovered hundreds of well-preserved artifacts scattered across the high mountain pass, including a Viking-period arrowhead, a horse’s snowshoe, and a wooden tinderbox with leather straps containing a stick and fragments of resin-filled wood. “We believe we are seeing a long series of losses and discards,” says project codirector Lars Pilø, who remarks that none of the finds seem to be associated with any of the others, despite the fact that most appear to date to the Viking Age and medieval period. Not everyone who ventured into the mountains survived the harsh conditions, however. The team found a packhorse—its ribcage and shod hooves still partially intact—that met its chilly end centuries ago.