  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.
