I've studied the archaeological reports from a reasonably sized village in 4-9th century Yorkshire (England) pretty extensively, and it was a mixed bag.

On the one hand, they traded a lot - they imported fish from the ocean (about 20 miles away), and exported cattle. They had fine glass wares, manufactured decent pottery and iron, and had many large buildings that suggest a prosperous settlement.

At the same time, the skeletons in their cemetery show that they died much younger than people today, and they show evidence of hard physical labor all their lives (they certainly spent a lot of time farming, though growing seasons prevent you from working in the field 365 days a year). They also show evidence of periods of malnutrition (something common at other sites, too) - some years, there just wasn't enough food. Their teeth were bad (though not terrible) - most had multiple cavities, some of them very severe, but also many healthy teeth.

Most interestingly, many (nearly half) of the sample tested had relocated since childhood. Many had immigrated to the community from western Britain, and a few from across the English channel. So they definitely moved around during their lives.

A few people have healed bone injuries, meaning they were wounded in battle, but survived.

Numerous traces of textiles were found on their bodies, and a lot of their time must have been spent turning wool into clothes (ethnographic studies of similar textile production techniques in Peru suggest a typical tunic of the style worn in this period may have taken as many a 600 hours - six hundred, yes - to produce; that's as much work as an annual harvest, per garment). It seems like women were responsible for this work, and it would have been a huge part of their daily lives. Spinning the yarn (on a drop spindle, like a spinning top - the spinning wheel wasn't invented until the later middle ages) took the most time. In Peru, children as young as 3 can learn to spin thread, and this was probably also the case in early medieval England.

There's a lot of information about the Vikings that shows they traveled significantly - not only the finds of foreign artefacts in the burials, but also evidence of their migrations through Europe into North America - timbers, trackable information about X leaving a particular area (Norway/Iceland) as an outlaw and the moving to Iceland/Greenland to make a life after that. I recently finished Nancy Marie Brown's "The Far Traveler", about a woman named Gudrid who is in the Icelandic sagas and is supposed to have gone to Vinland. It's an interesting read as it focuses a lot on archaeology and hard evidence versus suppositions, and includes the author's own travels to speak with experts. She includes some discussions about the navigation methods (which extremely stupid people wouldn't have thought of!)... and also about how much farming the Vikings did (rather a lot!).

I'm currently starting my own reading about Spanish history, and would point you in the direction of the Islamic scholars and empires who had things like trepanning, astronomical predictions and measuring equipment, advanced medicine, and so on. They made large advances, which Western science and scholars picked up on later and built on further in advancing their own end-goals.