Stellar populations in galaxies are vast repositories of fossil information. In recent years it has become possible to consider high resolution spectroscopic surveys of millions of stars. New high resolution multi-object spectrographs on 4-8m class telescopes (HERMES, WFMOS) will allow us for the first time to make large and detailed chemical abundance surveys of stars in the Galactic disk, bulge and halo, and apply the techniques of chemical tagging to recovering the fossil information left over from galaxy assembly. These instruments will have strong synergies with the GAIA astrometric satellite due to launch in 2011. The level of detail made possible by these future facilities will be necessary if we are to fully understand the physical processes involved in galaxy formation.