Introduction to soil as an engineering material, its behaviour (stress-strain) and how behaviour is measured, and a brief introduction to geotechnical design. Topics include introduction and fundamentals such as soil types, and phase relations, principle of effective stress, groundwater flow and permeability, consolidation of clay, magnitude of settlement resulting from primary consolidation, consolidation history and compressibility parameters, behaviour of soil in shear, common laboratory tests, drained versus undrained shear, shear strength, peak vs residual friction angle, critical state soil mechanics, geotechnical field characterization, drilling and sampling methods, SPT and CPT, slope stability, analysis and design of a tailings dam. Laboratories are an essential part of this course and a number of labs will be scheduled for students.