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Nothing grounds the truth like good poetry. Here, compliments of the Backfill editors, (and with apologies to the Beatles) is a piece of ground-truthing truth-grounding, free to enjoy at your end-of-season party, at a barbecue with the research team, on a Friday night out, or to contemplate in a soul-searching moment alone.

Yesterdays

Yesterdays

All this rubble was a public place

Now it looks as just another phase

Oh, I believe

in Yesterdays

Suddenly

All that’s left is this stratigraphy

And a context that’s so hard to see

Oh, Yesterdays went suddenly

How they had to go

I don’t know,

I couldn’t trace

I dug something wrong

Now I long for Yesterdays

Yesterdays

All these pretty finds were still in place

Now it looks as if they’re merely strays

Oh, I believe in Yesterdays

I will only find

what’s destroyed,

discarded, lost.

No organics left,

just a hole without a post.

Yesterdays

There was life, this was a happy place

But the colours faded all away,

and brown and grey remain for me.

Oh, I make digs at Yesterdays.

Bente Philippsen (The National Museum of Denmark and Aarhus University)

Søren M. Sindbæk (Aarhus University)