This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA-97, held in Sitges, Spain, in June 1997.The 24 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 54 submissions. Also included are abstracts of two invited talks and four system descriptions. Besides classical topics like termination, confluence, or applications to theorem proving, several new approaches to rewriting are presented. All in all, this volume presents the state of the art in the area of rewriting techniques and applications.