Today, we learn about how farming made villages possible. Being able to store extra food allowed humans to do other things, like build houses, build roads to go visit people in other houses, invent cooking tools, weapons, and more. Even so, there were many people at the same time who got their food without planting anything because they were foragers, pastoralists, or nomads.
Driving Question: How did villages change how people lived?
- Villages were a new kind of community. They were larger than most nomadic bands and were typically made up of several families clustered together. And they didn’t move around.
- If you lived in a village, this meant that the nomadic people around you knew where to come if they wanted to trade for your crops or goods, and that you could keep in contact with the people in the next village over. This led to the first networks of any real size—“village networks,” in which groups of villages could cluster together for trade, defense, and to share religion and ideas.
Word of the Day: Nomadic
- Definition: related to, being, or resembling a member of a group or tribe that has no permanent home and moves from place to place.
- Basically, nomads are a society of people that move from place to place following seasonal migration patterns of the plants and animals they live off of. Well, really just animals. Not many plants migrate as it turns out.
Lesson
- Read “Village Networks”
- As you read, think about how “village networks” were not only new types of communities, but how the networks of interaction started to change because of them as well.
Historian’s Journal Prompt
Think about where you live. You might live in a city, a small town, or on a farm. Think about how COVID-19 has impacted where you live and how the size of your community plays a role in determining the virus’ impact on it.
