Humanities Homework Help

A political/military network (PMN) is a network of polities that are allying and making war on one another, like the modern international system or earlier regional PMNs composed of chiefdoms, states or empires. PMNs have settlement systems composed of cities, towns, villages and hamlets and may be in interaction with nomadic peoples who live in temporary camps. Pick a single focal settlement (for example a specific Chumash village before the Europeans arrived in Southern California, or Carthage from 300 to 50 BCE). Describe the nature of the polity[i] within which your focal settlement is located, and the relations that that polity has with other polities. Use the idea of nested interaction networks in Chase-Dunn and Hall (and discuss in lecture) to try to estimate how far the bulk goods, prestige goods, political-military networks and information network extend away from your focal settlement. For example, what is the most distant settlement from which the focal settlement occasionally gets food (etc.)? These are the systemic spatial boundaries of the world-system of which your focal settlement is a part. Also study the relations that the humans living in your focal settlement have with nature: how they get their food, raw materials, fuel, and water? And study the transportation networks that link your focal settlement to other settlements. Use the idea of a settlement size distribution to examine the relative population sizes of the settlements that are linked together in your settlement system. Examine and discuss whether the world-system you are studying has core/periphery differentiation or core/periphery hierarchy in its relationships among polities. Also use other ideas and readings from the course in your consideration of this settlement system.

A list of datasets on city population sizes is on the course Ilearn site under Course Materials: Data Sets. David Wilkinson’s maps of cities and their civilization may also be helpful. These are at https://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/asa01/wilkinson.htm

Tell the story of the settlement system of which your focal settlement is a part and suggest explanations for the patterns that you find. The text of your paper should be no longer than 10 typed pages of text. (about 2500 words). The bibliography, pictures and maps can be on additional pages. Include a complete bibliography of your sources.

Read the list of requirements above several times during the period in which you are working on your paper and be sure to do each of the things that are requested. Read the requirements one more time before you submit your paper.A useful Guide to Writing Research Papers: https://www.scribbr.com/category/research-paper/

Here is the topic and the sources that might be useful: