  We present a methodological study to find out how far back and to what
precision star formation histories of galaxies can be reconstructed from CMDs,
from integrated spectra and Lick indices, and from integrated multi-band
photometry. Our evolutionary synthesis models GALEV allow to describe the
evolution of galaxies in terms of all three approaches and we have assumed
typical observational uncertainties for each of them and then investigated to
what extent and accuracy different star formation histories can be
discriminated. For a field in the LMC bar region with both a deep CMD from HST
observations and a trailing slit spectrum across exactly the same field of view
we could test our modelling results against real data.
