This unusual memorial stands in the New Forest National Park near Lyndhurst, Hampshire. At the start of World War I, manpower shortages prevented England from importing enough Canadian timber to supply the war’s needs, so English forests had to be felled to meet the requirement. The local foresters were away fighting, so a Portuguese Army unit with the Canadian Timber Corps lent its aid. The fireplace is all that remains of their cookhouse, and has preserved to honor their contribution.

The plaque reads, “This is the site of a hutted camp occupied by a Portuguese army unit during the first World War. This unit assisted the depleted local labour force in producing timber for the war effort. The Forestry Commission have retained the fireplace from the cookhouse as a memorial to the men who lived and worked here and acknowledge the financial assistance of the Portuguese government in its renovation.”

To disrupt German morale during World War II, the Allies hatched a plan to send anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through the mail. They quizzed prisoners of war about the German postal service and drew on local telephone directories to identify 2 million addressees who might receive forged letters and subversive material. Then the letters were loaded into counterfeit mailbags and dropped near destroyed trains in the hope that they’d be collected and delivered.

By 1945 twenty missions had been completed, but by then many German homes had been destroyed and their inhabitants killed or displaced, so the operation had limited effect. Above is a striking stamp prepared for the effort — the subscript on the “death head” stamp reads “Futsches Reich” (ruined empire) rather than “Deutsches Reich” (German Empire). Altogether 96,000 stamps were prepared for the effort, but the “death head” stamp may never have been used.

Ancient Athenians would sometimes encounter a remarkable sculpture on roads and in public places: The bearded head of the god Hermes set on a squared pillar of stone, with male genitals carved at the appropriate height. Hermes had been a phallic god before becoming a guardian of merchants and travelers, and so was associated with fertility, luck, roads, and borders. The hermae served as a form of protection from evil and were sometimes anointed with oil or bedecked with garlands.

Plato writes that “figures of Hermes” were set up “along the roads in the midst of the city and every district town” “with the design of educating those of the countryside,” sometimes by bearing edifying inscriptions. The sculptures did not always depict Hermes — this one, from the Athenian Agora, honors Demosthenes. The practice spread eventually to Rome, where the figures were known as mercuriae.

(Peter Keegan, Graffiti in Antiquity, 2014.)

Two thousand years ago, a Roman man pressed his hand into a brick that had been set out to dry before firing.

The brick is now held at the Archaeological Museum of Cherchell in Algeria.

From Reddit’s ArtefactPorn.