  Technologies and their production systems are used by archaeologists and
anthropologists to study complexity of sociotechnical systems. However, there
are several issues that hamper agreement about what constitutes complexity and
how we can systematically compare the complexity of production systems. In this
work, we propose a novel approach to assess the behavioural and structural
complexity of production systems using Petri nets. Petri nets are well known
formal models commonly used in, for example, biological and business process
modelling, as well as software engineering. The use of Petri nets overcomes
several obstacles of current approaches in archaeology and anthropology, such
as the incompatibility of the intrinsic sequential logic of the available
methods with inherently non sequential processes, and the inability to
explicitly model activities and resources separately. We test the proposed
Petri net modelling approach on two traditional production systems of adhesives
made by Ju hoan makers from Nyae, Namibia from Ammocharis coranica and Ozoroa
schinzii plants. We run simulations in which we assess the complexity of these
two adhesive production systems in detail and show how Petri net dynamics
reveal the structural and behavioural complexity of different production
scenarios. We show that concurrency may be prevalent in the production system
of adhesive technologies and discuss how changes in location during the process
may serve to control the behavioural complexity of a production system. The
approach presented in this paper paves the way for future systematic
visualization, analysis, and comparison of ancient production systems,
accounting for the inherent complex, concurrent, and action and resource
oriented aspects of such processes.
