Measuring Technological Complexity Across Stone and Metal Technologies in Ancient Bengal: An Empirical Application of Petri Net–Based Complexity Metrics
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Abstract
Archaeological work in Bengal has produced rich descriptions of stone, ceramic and metal technologies from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Early Iron Age, yet these technologies are usually compared qualitatively rather than measured against a common scale of complexity. This paper adapts the Petri net–based technological complexity framework proposed by Fajardo, Kozowyk and Langejans (2023) to a set of reconstructed chaînes opératoires from Bengal and eastern India. Five representative workflows are modelled: core-and-flake handaxe production, Late Pleistocene microlithic bladelet production, Neolithic/Neo-Chalcolithic ground-stone axe manufacture, Chalcolithic copper ornament casting, and Early Iron Age bloomery iron smelting and forging. Each sequence is encoded as a Petri net and evaluated using three complexity dimensions defined by Fajardo et al.: structural complexity, behavioural complexity and information complexity. Results show a clear ordinal increase in technological complexity from early lithic reduction to iron smelting, with microliths and ground-stone axes occupying intermediate positions. Technologies associated with larger, more permanent settlements and stronger evidence for craft specialisation tend to exhibit higher complexity scores. The study demonstrates that Petri net–based metrics can be meaningfully applied to South Asian archaeological datasets, providing a quantitative basis for linking technological complexity with cognitive demands and socio-economic organisation in Bengal’s long-term history.
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