Wattle and daub

Wattle and daub is a composite building method used for making walls and buildings, in which a woven lattice of wooden strips called "wattle" is "daubed" with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, and straw.

There are suggestions that construction techniques such as lath and plaster and even cob may have evolved from wattle and daub.

Fragments from prehistoric wattle and daub buildings have been found in Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica and North America.

[1] Evidence for wattle and daub (or "wattle and reed") fire pits, storage bins, and buildings shows up in Egyptian archaeological sites such as Merimda and El Omari, dating back to the 5th millennium BCE, predating the use of mud brick and continuing to be the preferred building material until about the start of the First Dynasty.

[3] A review of English architecture especially reveals that the sophistication of this craft is dependent on the various styles of timber frame housing.

The wattle is made by weaving thin branches (either whole, or more usually split) or slats between upright stakes.

The ledgers are sprung into each upright timber (stud) through a system of augered holes on one side and short chiseled grooves along the other.

First, a series of evenly spaced holes are drilled along the middle of the inner face of each upper timber.

In the early days of the colonisation of South Australia, in areas where substantial timber was unavailable, pioneers' cottages and other small buildings were frequently constructed with light vertical timbers, which may have been "native pine" (Callitris or Casuarina spp.

), driven into the ground, the gaps being stopped with pug (kneaded clay and grass mixture).

Thin staves of ash were attached, then daubed with a mixture of mud, straw, hair and dung.

[15] Jacal can refer to a type of crude house whose wall is built with wattle and daub in southwestern US.

Closely spaced upright sticks or poles driven into the ground with small branches (wattle) interwoven between them make the structural frame of the wall.