The engineering understanding of the behaviour shallow foundation in earthquakes has developed piecemeal over the past sixty years with the emergence and refinement of solutions to several separate aspects of the overall problem, prompted and provoked by field observations. The past few years have seen more rapid development as the insights and techniques developed for the separate aspects of seismic foundation behaviour have been integrated into more complete solutions. Unsurprisingly the more complete solutions require numerical solution techniques which make them less transparent than their progenitors. The review commences by considering relevant aspects of soil and rock behaviour, not all of which have been thoroughly investigated to date. Elastic solutions are reviewed followed by a review of seismic bearing capacity solutions, consideration of foundation rocking and solutions for permanent displacements and the combination of all of these aspects into macro-elements suitable for combined numerical analysis of the soil-foundation-structure system. The understanding of shallow foundation seismic behaviour continues to develop with new issues coming to the fore. The paper considers some of the areas of current development and some of the issues which need to be addressed going forwards.