Progress in earthquake geotechnical engineering in the past 10 to 12 years is reviewed. Developments in understanding foundation behaviour and also liquefaction are described briefly. It is explained that perhaps the greatest advance in the period is the interpretation of the substantial amount of site response data which has come to hand. This clarifies earlier controversy about the contribution of nonlinear soil behaviour to site response. Findings show that it is possible for stiff soil sites to behave in a linear manner for quite large peak ground accelerations but for softer soils significant nonlinear response has been inferred using a number of different approaches.