mattelton's blog

A set of almost a million documents recording the career of Winston Churchill is now available to explore online. The records, held in the archives of Churchill College, Cambridge and published digitally by Bloomsbury, include the future prime minister's school reports as well as drafts of wartime speeches and cigar bills.

Tests on artificial toes discovered at a site near present-day Luxor in Egypt show that they are the world's earliest prosthetics, according to scientists. Replicas of the devices, discovered in the necropolis at Thebe and thought to date from between 900 and 600 BC, were constructed by Jacqueline Finch, a researcher from the University of Manchester.

A scrap of papyrus dating from the fourth century AD includes text that makes reference to the 'wife of Jesus', according to a Harvard academic. Divinity professor Karen King claims that researchers have identified the phrase "Jesus said to them, 'my wife'," on the business card-sized fragment, which it is thought could refer to Mary Magdalene.

Archaeologists searching for the grave of Richard III say that there is "strong circumstantial evidence" that remains discovered in a Leicester car park are those of the king. The fully intact skeleton, which shows signs of a deformed spine, the head of a barbed iron arrow embedded in its back and a gashed skull, was discovered in a project launched at the end of August by experts from the University of Leicester and the Richard III Society.

A collection of thousands of the oldest documents in Scotland's history has been made publicly available online in a new digital database charting life in the Middle Ages. The People in Medieval Scotland project, run by experts from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and King's College London, has catalogued 8,600 records written between 1093 and 1314.

A project to digitise Second World War Home Guard records has revealed that many of the volunteers were too young to enlist for military service.

The study of 80,000 personnel documents of men who served in the County of Durham in 1940, carried out by staff at The National Archives, shows that 50 per cent of the records were of people under the age of 27 years old and 28 per cent were of men aged 18 or younger.

A new project to locate the remains of Richard III has been launched by archaeologists in Leicester. 

The team from the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council will excavate a car park on the site where the monarch is thought to have been buried. Following his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the king's body was brought to a Franciscan friary, known as Greyfriars, in the city, although the exact location of the grave is no longer known.