THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TOUR OF THE VILLAGE

On one of our days in the village, we did an ethnographic tour of the village. This involved splitting into four groups and visiting four different parts of the village where the people used to work, live, and relax.

• The first site was the school. It was a single small room connected to the teacher´s house. We learned that the children wrote on pieces of slate like a chalkboard, and that they studied geometric shapes, gegography, mathematics, and more. 

                                     

• The second site was the blacksmith´s shop. This was a small building with a large forge and many examples of tools the blacksmith used and made. The village blacksmith was an important person who didn´t do the same type of work as everyone else, like farming. Whatever he needed was provided for him by the villagers. We also learned that the forge was one of the main places that the men of the village gathered to socialize.

                                      

• The third place was the washing site, where the women would go to wash everything. This place consisted of a three-walled structure with two pools, one for washing andone for rinsing. The pools were connected by a small opening, and a current ran through such that the dirty water wouldn´t flow into the other pool. There the women would socialize. 

                                       

• The last site was the museum house. This house was well preserved from the days that people inhabited the village, and it retained (more or less) its original structure. We saw the first floor, where the animals lived in the winter, as well as the upstairs, where the people lived. There was a kitchen with a large clay oven, a pantry/cold room to store food, two small bedrooms, and a large attic-like place to store things. In many of the rooms, examples of original tools and items the people used were humg on the walls and displayed on the floor.