  Dramatic recent progress in understanding galactic chemical evolution (GCE)
has been driven partly by direct observations of the distant past with HST and
JWST of stellar abundances from giant high-resolution spectroscopic surveys
(APOGEE, GALAH) and the complementary power of Gaia astrometry and photometry.
Focusing on archaeology, I give a rapid-fire, and I hope synthesizing, review
of work my collaborators and I have done on theoretical modeling and
observational interpretation. I discuss (1) the interleaved but distinguishable
roles of stellar scale astrophysics and galactic scale astrophysics in
governing GCE, (2) the use of abundance ratio trends to empirically infer
nucleosynthetic yields, (3) the uncertainty in the overall scale of yields and
its degeneracy with the importance of galactic outflows, (4) the emergence of
equilibrium in GCE, (5) the dimensionality of the stellar distribution in
chemical abundance space, and (6) insights from chemical abundances on the
early history of the Milky Way, including measurements of the intrinsic scatter
of abundance ratios in metal-poor stars (-2 < [Fe/H] < -1), suggesting that a
typical halo star at this metallicity is enriched by the products of $N \sim
50$ supernovae mixed over $\sim 10^5 M_\odot$ of star-forming gas.
