“Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all,” Thomas Hobbes famously proclaimed. He exaggerated. As I shall point out later, his position is more subtle than that suggested by this famous citation. There is no doubt, however, that he thought the sword to be of central importance to the state. This is one of the very few points about which there is little disagreement today with Hobbes; state power is widely thought to be coercive. The view that governments must wield force or that their power is necessarily coercive is widespread in contemporary political thought. For instance, John Rawls claims that “political power is always coercive power backed up by the government's use of sanctions, for government alone has the authority to use force in upholding its laws.” He is not alone in thinking this, as we shall see. This belief in the centrality of coercion and force plays an important but not well-appreciated role in contemporary political thought. However, it is an idea which is to some extent mistaken and quite misleading.

State Power is Coercive

Rawls's belief in the coercive nature of political power appears to be significant for his liberal theory. It is one of two special features of “constitutional regimes” central to his influential conception of political legitimacy. The other feature is that “[p]olitical society is closed: we come to be within it and we do not, and indeed cannot, enter or leave it voluntarily.” Indeed, it is these two features that he believes give rise to “the question of the legitimacy of the general structure of authority.” Rawls thinks that

Working with Rock Art presents the outcomes of the first ever collaboration between South Africa and Scandinavia in the field of rock art studies. The particular focus was on hunter-gatherer rock arts. Norway and South Africa are two countries that are famous for their ancient rock engravings and rock paintings. Both have rock art of such great international significance that they are registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In both countries therefore, rock art has a high public profile and both governments have made rock art research, conservation and rock art tourism national priorities. However, the research traditions in each region have followed vastly different trajectories.

Our collaboration therefore sought to bring together a series of teams from each region to share their experiences on how we work with rock art. We hoped that our different experiences would prove mutually challenging, and they did. It caused a series of profound debates about what constitutes best practice in the field of rock art studies and these have changed the way we work in tangible ways. We challenged all of the collaborators to report their perspectives at a joint conference in Kimberley, South Africa in 2006 and then to engage in further discussions and workshops before writing up these experiences for this volume. This volume therefore represents the consolidated findings of a prolonged engagement of research and debate in rock art practice. It is therefore predominantly a book about method, and this has great importance in itself, because rock art studies is a growing discipline but one in which we have no internationally agreed upon methods or standards of practice.

We divide the book into three parts, each reflecting one of the core foci of our collaboration:

METHODS OF DOCUMENTING AND RECORDING ROCK ART

All of us face a common problem in our rock art data capture: how do we reduce rock art on a three dimensional surface to a two-dimensional recording in a manner that does not damage the art in any way and without losing any three-dimensional features that may prove vital to interpretation? In both Norway and South Africa research has shown that natural rock features such as cracks and hollows played a fundamental role in determining the placement of rock art imagery.