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.