Ah but critical to note, the odds of surviving that smallpox are better in a freshly rebuilt mold free dry draftless house than some old dump of a place with le

Ah but critical to note, the odds of surviving that smallpox are better in a freshly rebuilt mold free dry draftless house than some old dump of a place with leaky roof and crumbling drafty walls. Also theoretically if you're stuck at home trying to rebuild the village you can't be at the next village over trying to romance some farmers daughter while accidentally catching smallpox. So both the physical act of rebuilding and the result of rebuilding both increase odds of survival. An interesting resource allocation problem is they may have liked building houses out of older hardwood but if they any random dude chop down and use wood they might very well exceed their carrying capacity so nobody build nothing unless we all split the "house wood" stand of trees equally, perhaps after we burn the village completely down. Another interesting idea is you can burn the bark off trees for building if you're really careful, but if you're not careful, you'll burn the whole log, maybe take the whole village down. So annual barkless log house construction... 95% odds the village gets a new hut and the fleas get fumigated, 5% odds the whole village goes up in flames. Well sometimes ya gotta roll the dice, I guess.