Richard I. Macphail is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He is coauthor of Soils and Micromorphology in Archaeology (with Marie-Agnhs Courty and Paul Goldberg, Cambridge, 1990) and Practical and Theoretical Geoarchaeology (with Paul Goldberg, 2005), and the editor of 'Site Formation Processes in Archaeology: Soil and Sediment Micromorphology' (in Quaternary International, 2012). Macphail has initiated workshops (1990–2016) and training (2006–16) in archaeological soil micromorphology (within the International Union of Soil Science), was associate editor for Geoarchaeology (1990–2014), Professor Invité at Tours in 2004, and gained the Rip Rapp Award from the Geological Society of America in 2009.