Investigating the earliest epochs of the Milky Way halo

Resolved stellar spectroscopy can obtain knowledge about chemical enrichment processes back to the earliest times, when the oldest stars were formed. In this contribution I will review the early (chemical) evolution of the Milky Way halo from an observational perspective. In particular, I will discuss our understanding of the origin of the peculiar abundance patterns in various subclasses of extremely metal-poor stars, taking into account new data from our abundance and radial velocity monitoring programs, and their implications for our understanding of the formation and early evolution of both the Milky Way halo and the satellite dwarf galaxies therein. I conclude by presenting the ``Pristine'' survey, a program on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to study this intriguing epoch much more efficiently.