Archaeology and evolution of QCD

In this article, I discuss a few of the points which - to my judgement - illustrate well the historical evolution of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), both from a scientific and a sociological point of view. There has been an enormous progress in perturbative and non-perturbative QCD since quarks were invented, in 1963. This phenomenological progress often required phenomenally difficult theoretical developments, and played a key role in the understanding of experimental results, most recently at the LHC. The most challenging QCD problem - confinement - is not yet solved, in spite of a one million dollars prize awaiting whoever solves it