  The star formation history of a galaxy, explicitely here our Milky Way
Galaxy, where the most detailed information is attainable, is the convolution
of two functions. One function describes the rate of formation of the stars
which are today in the Galaxy. The second describes the assembly of those stars
into the present Galactic potential well. There is direct evidence that this
assembly continues today, with both stars and gas being assembled into, or at
least rearranged in, the Galactic potential. But is this recent accretion
significant? Was the last significant accretion the formation of the thick
disk, some 10Gyr ago?. Recent spectroscopic studies support this unexpected
result, while dynamical studies find increasing numbers of specific examples of
smaller scale more recent accretion. We present early results for one specific
such survey, the Anglo Australian Old Stellar populations Survey, to illustrate
current studies.
