Foreword

Festschrifts are only produced for the very best scholars. And they are produced by the best scholars. So, the papers in this book contain some of the finest thinking in rock art research, undertaken by people who have been inspired by one of the greatest thinkers in rock art research. From early in his career, John Kay Clegg’s work veered from the ordinary interests and descriptive obsessions of rock art research to focus on a different type of question: why do we believe so-and-so? For decades, his everyday task was to make those around him question the unquestionable. He questioned whether the aesthetics that the viewer took to rock art had any congruence with the aesthetics of the original artist. He questioned whether the motif of a fish was really a depiction of a fish - and he developed the famous Cleggian combination of exclamation mark and motif to remind the reader that ‘the fish’ was really a !fish. Long before the current revolution in digital recording Clegg experimented with new ways to record rock art, through photogrammetry, and to recognise different rock art techniques. He sought the information that was coded into graffiti, at a time when graffiti was considered graffiti, not part of a visual communication system.