Activity
1. Depending
on the number of students in your class, divide the class
into groups of two or three. The lesson contains information
for eleven groups. Each group will be given a copy of
the Trade Routes Matrix II to fill out and will choose
(or be assigned) a location. The eleven locations for
the families are:
London
Paris
Beijing
Venice
Timbuktu
Constantinople
Moscow
Mecca
Cairo
Seville or Granada
Delhi
2.
Each group must look at their city and imagine what the
life of a wealthy family would be like in
the Middle Ages. What foods/spices, clothing/cloth, and
ornamental/furniture
items might a wealthy family buy from traders?
The students must choose an item from each of the three
categories
that come from different places in the world.
They
will be able to do this by using the list of
goods exported
from different regions of the medieval world
that was used in the Explore Lesson.
3. Then using the map of medieval world trade routes
and the topographical map of the world (also
from the Explore Lesson), the students will trace the
route
that each item took while also identifying
two intermediary places that the item would have gone
through in transit.
This is important not just in understanding
how complicated trade routes were or could have been,
but also in seeing
that with each port or stop in a land journey,
new contagions
would be encountered and possibly picked up
by the traders, the sailors, and/or the members of a
caravan.
Depending
on what the item of trade was, it could have
also picked up a vector of disease, such as fleas in
bolts of cloth.
4.
Finally the students need to identify which port of entry
the traders used when they arrived
in the
country
of the wealthy family. This should help the
students appreciate just how many opportunities
disease vectors
had to interact with the items of trade a
wealthy family would take into their home and their
lives.
5.
As the students trace the routes that the various items
of trade took ask the class
to
point out whenever
that route had a Mediterranean city as
a port of entry. This will help to highlight
a point
being made in the
social studies lessons.
6.
The activities described above should probably take the
small group
of students
one class
period to complete.
These activities build on the work that
was done in the Explore Lesson. Now students
are investigating
in greater
detail how actual individuals would be
exposed
to a variety of diseases present, and
running rampant, in
the medieval
world. The next two classes are for each
group of students to make a presentation
to the class
as a whole about
the information that they found about
trade and the connections to the spread of infectious
diseases. Closure
Discuss
with the students how the pivotal activity of international
trade created life in the medieval world both in terms of the
availability of material goods and how successfully infectious
diseases traveled the globe. These infectious diseases became
a part of everyday reality for people living far from the initial
areas of outbreak. Ask the students to begin to think about
how a scientist and a historian would look at this same aspect
of medieval life- trade- in very different lights.
Homework
None |
