  There are at least three reasons for being interested in galaxies at high
redshifts that formed most of their stars quite quickly early in the history of
the Universe: (1) the ages of their stellar populations can potentially place
interesting constraints on cosmological parameters and on the epoch of the
earliest major episodes of star formation, (2) their morphologies may provide
important clues to the history and mechanisms of spheroid formation, and (3)
they are likely to identify the regions of highest overdensity at a given
redshift.
  We describe a systematic search for galaxies at z ~ 1.5 having essentially
pure old stellar populations, with little or no recent star formation. Our
approach is to apply a "photometric sieve" to the fields of quasars near this
redshift, looking for companion objects with the expected spectral-energy
distributions. Follow-up observations on two of the fields having candidates
discovered by this technique are described.
