Research Paper for Sociology 10

 The task is to study a premodern[1] settlement system of a whole political-military network [2] composed of interacting polities. On April 26 please turn in a single sheet of paper with your name, email address and the main premodern settlement that will be the focus of your study of a settlement system and the time period you will study. Also include the citations for three specific library (non-Internet) sources of information about the focal settlement and the other settlements with which it is interacting.

            A political/military network 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). Use the idea of nested interaction networks in Chase-Dunn and Hall to try to estimate the spatial scale of the bulk goods, prestige goods, political-military network and information network within which your focal settlement is interacting. These are the 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. Also use other ideas and readings from the course in your consideration of this settlement system.

 

Data on the population sizes of cities are available from Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth. The population estimates for the cities in Chandler are in a machine-readable dataset called citypop5.xls that is accessible on the course web site. 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 typewritten double-spaced pages. Include a bibliography of your sources and maps if you can find them. The paper is due on May 31.

 


[1] Premodern means before 500 years ago or, if more recent, a settlement that has had no significant interaction with Europeans.

[2] A political-military network is a regional system of interacting polities (chiefdoms, states or empires) that make alliances or war with one another.