Comparison of chemical properties of SMC stellar clusters and those of their surrounding fields.

Our group has studied star clusters and field stars of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) for several years, using the FORS2 instrument on the VLT (Paranal, Chile). We have derived metallicities from CaII triplet lines and ages from both the δV parameter and (V,V-I) color-magnitude diagrams. We have studied 29 star clusters and approximately 700 field stars surrounding these clusters. We have analyzed and compared the chemical properties of those clusters and of their surrounding field stars. We found evidence for possible differences between the chemical evolution histories of these two different SMC stellar populations.