Wattle and Daub

Wattle and daub is a composite building technique in which a woven lattice of wooden strips, the wattle, is plastered over with a sticky daub typically made of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw, forming an infill panel within a timber frame rather than a load-bearing wall on its own. Used across prehistoric and medieval Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and the Americas, it produced the visible black-and-white half-timbered facades common in English and German vernacular architecture, where the exposed timber frame and painted or limewashed daub infill became a defining regional aesthetic as well as a structural system.