The bone collector: eccentric archaeological treasury to be digitised

The bone reports, body parts and even jokey postcards collected by founding figure of palaeopathology Calvin Wells will be available online for the first time

An archaeological treasury - the voluminous collection of papers, slides, research notes, recordings, jokey postcards, and miscellaneous bits of long-dead human beings collected by the late Calvin Wells - is to be digitised to make it available in its eccentric entirety to scholars for the first time.

The archive, for which the University of Bradford has won a grant of almost 140,000 from the Wellcome Trust, includes thousands of the "bone reports" for which Wells became famous. The reports were based on boxes of human remains sent by archaeologists to Wells's home and studied on the kitchen table.