Archeology and evolution of QCD

These are excerpts from the closing talk at the “XIIth Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum”, which took place last Summer in Thessaloniki –an excellent place to enjoy an interest in archeology. A more complete personal view of the early days of QCD and the rest of the Standard Model is given in [1]. Here I discuss a few of the points which –to my judgement– illustrate well the QCD evolution (in time), both from a scientific and a sociological point of view.