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27-541: The architecture of phases A and B (8200-7500 BC, calibrated) is characterised by circular wattle and daub structures, with post holes cut into the bedrock. Some deep pits may have served as wells. Ca. 300 blades of Anatolian obsidian point to trade connections with the mainland. Sickles are made of multiple parts, and projectile points made of bipolar blades , lacking in the later Khirokitia culture, are common. The site contains wells and cattle enclosures as well. The middle and late phases (7500 BC) conform more closely to

54-515: A common building material for wall and ceiling surfaces, in which a series of nailed wooden strips are covered with plaster smoothed into a flat surface. In many regions this building method has itself been overtaken by drywall construction using plasterboard sheets. The wattle is made by weaving thin branches (either whole, or more usually split) or slats between upright stakes. The wattle may be made as loose panels, slotted between timber framing to make infill panels, or made in place to form

81-459: A human and a cat. The grave is estimated to be 9,500 years old, pushing back the earliest known feline-human association significantly. The cat specimen is large and closely resembles the African wildcat ( Felis silvestris lybica ), rather than present-day domestic cats. Wattle and daub Wattle and daub is a composite building method used for making walls and buildings, in which

108-790: A phase characterized by a light occupation. Eiwanger documented that storage areas appeared during phase II when the intensity of the occupation increased. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Merimde economy was dominated by agriculture although some fishing and hunting were practiced to a lesser degree. The settlement consisted of small huts made of wattle and reed with a round or elliptical ground plan. Merimde pottery lacked "rippled marks". Burials had unique characteristics, different from those practiced in Upper Egyptian Predynastic Egypt and later Dynastic Egypt. There were no separate areas for cemeteries and

135-434: A system of augered holes on one side and short chiseled grooves along the other. The holes (along with holes of square paneling) are drilled at a slight angle towards the outer face of each stud. This allows room for upright hazels to be tied to ledgers from the inside of the building. The horizontal ledgers are placed every two to three feet (0.6 to 0.9 metres) with whole hazel rods positioned upright top to bottom and lashed to

162-479: 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. Mud or an adobe clay (daub) is covered outside. To provide additional weather protection, the wall is usually plastered. Merimde culture The Merimde culture (also Merimde Beni-Salame or Benisalam ) ( Arabic : مرمدة بني سلامة )

189-412: A woven lattice of wooden strips called " wattle " is "daubed" with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw. Wattle and daub has been used for at least 6,000 years and is still an important construction method in many parts of the world. Many historic buildings include wattle and daub construction. The wattle and daub technique has been used since

216-413: Is provided by straw, hair, hay or other fibrous materials, and helps to hold the mix together as well as to control shrinkage and provide flexibility. The daub may be mixed by hand, or by treading – either by humans or livestock . It is then applied to the wattle and allowed to dry, and often then whitewashed to increase its resistance to rain. Sometimes there can be more than one layer of daub. At

243-629: The Egyptian Antiquities Organization and the German Institute of Archaeology led to the establishment of the stratigraphical sequence. Merimde shows a sequence of occupations which lasted almost a millennium according to some estimates. While Junker identified three sequences, others such as Joseph Eiwanger established in 1977 that there are five with significantly different levels of development. Artifacts such as ceramics were quite primitive during phase I –

270-550: The Khirokitia culture with circular stone houses, comparable to those at Kastros . Imported obsidian is rare, and sickles are made from single robust blades. The site is important because it attests to the presence of cattle in the aceramic Neolithic period. Cattle died out in the course of the 8th millennium and were not reintroduced until the ceramic Neolithic. Only dog and pig bones show morphological signs of domestication (size reduction), sheep, goat and cattle bones are in

297-1184: The Neolithic period. It was common for houses of Linear pottery and Rössen cultures of middle Europe, but is also found in Western Asia ( Çatalhöyük , Shillourokambos ) as well as in North America ( Mississippian culture ) and South America ( Brazil ). In Africa it is common in the architecture of traditional houses such as those of the Ashanti people . Its usage dates back at least 6,000 years. 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. 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

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324-718: 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. It continued to flourish well into the New Kingdom and beyond. Vitruvius refers to it as being employed in Rome . 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 and plaster process has been replaced in modern architecture by brick and mortar or by lath and plaster ,

351-553: The Mitchell Site, the anterior of the house had double layers of burned daub. There were two popular choices for wattle and daub infill paneling: close-studded paneling and square paneling. Close-studding panels create a much narrower space between the timbers: anywhere from 7 to 16 inches (18 to 40 cm). For this style of panel, weaving is too difficult, so the wattles run horizontally and are known as ledgers. The ledgers are sprung into each upright timber (stud) through

378-563: The West delta of the Nile in Lower Egypt 45 km northwest of Cairo . The site was discovered by German archaeologist Hermann Junker , who excavated 6,400 m of the site during his West Nile Delta expedition in 1928. Early on, the settlement had been considered to be ca. 25 hectares, but recent research expanded this to at least 40 hectares. Later excavations in the 1970s performed by

405-439: The common use of acacias as wattle in early Australian European settlements. Daub is usually created from a mixture of ingredients from three categories: binders , aggregates and reinforcement. Binders hold the mix together and can include clay, lime , chalk dust and limestone dust. Aggregates give the mix its bulk and dimensional stability through materials such as mud, sand, crushed chalk and crushed stone. Reinforcement

432-435: The daub. To insert wattles in a square panel several steps are required. First, a series of evenly spaced holes are drilled along the middle of the inner face of each upper timber. Next, a continuous groove is cut along the middle of each inner face of the lower timber in each panel. Vertical slender timbers, known as staves, are then inserted and these hold the whole panel within the timber frame. The staves are positioned into

459-506: The dead were buried within the settlement in a flexed position in oval pits without grave goods and offerings. In the time of the Maadi culture, the place was used as a cemetery. Excavations of Merimde burials have yielded a number of skeletons, chiefly those of females. The fossils are generally taller and more robust than later predynastic Egyptian specimens. In this regard, the Merimde skeletons are most similar to those associated with

486-409: The ground, the gaps being stopped with pug (kneaded clay and grass mixture). Another term for this construction is palisade and pug . "Mud and stud" is a similar process to wattle and daub, with a simple frame consisting only of upright studs joined by cross rails at the tops and bottoms. Thin staves of ash were attached, then daubed with a mixture of mud, straw, hair and dung. The style of building

513-555: The holes and then sprung into the grooves. They must be placed with sufficient gaps to weave the flexible horizontal wattles. In some places or cultures, the technique of wattle and daub was used with different materials and thus has different names. 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

540-415: The ledgers. These hazel rods are generally tied a finger-width apart with 6–8 rods each with a 16-inch (40 cm) width. Gaps allow key formation for drying. Square panels are large, wide panels typical of some later timber-frame houses. These panels may be square in shape, or sometimes triangular to accommodate arched or decorative bracing. This style requires the wattles to be woven for better support of

567-469: The new genetic evidence, it places the domestication of the cat in a different context. Historians previously accounted Egypt as the earliest site of cat domestication due to the clear depictions of house cats in ancient Egyptian paintings about 3,600 years old. However, in 2004, a Neolithic grave was excavated in Shillourokambos, Cyprus that contained skeletons, laid close to one another, of both

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594-499: The oldest evidence of human domestication of cats was found. Until recently the cat was commonly believed to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt , where it was a cult animal. But three years ago a group of French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne discovered the remains of an 8-month-old cat buried with its human owner at a Neolithic site in Cyprus. The date of the burial far precedes Egyptian civilization. Together with

621-464: The size range of the wild species ( Mouflon , bezoar goat and wild cattle , respectively). The range of bones present point to a killing near the site, thus making a state of pre-domestication probable. Fox and persian fallow deer are present as well, but seem to have been hunted. There are no bones of the Holocene dwarf fauna present in Shillourokambos. Shillourokambos is also the site where

648-433: The type of brick molded with the same materials and used as infilling between posts. Columbage refers to the timber-framed construction with diagonal bracing of the framework. Pierratage or bousillage is the material filled into the structural timbers. Bajarreque is a wall constructed with the technique of wattle and daub. The wattle here is made of bagasse , and the daub is the mix of clay and straw. Jacal can refer to

675-525: The whole of a wall. In different regions, the material of wattle can be different. For example, at the Mitchell Site on the northern outskirts of the city of Mitchell, South Dakota, willow has been found as the wattle material of the walls of the house. Reeds and vines can also be used as wattle material. The origin of the term wattle describing a group of acacias in Australia, is derived from

702-647: Was a Neolithic culture in the West Nile Delta in Lower Egypt , which corresponds in its later phase to the Faiyum A culture and the Badari culture in Predynastic Egypt . It is estimated that the culture evolved between 4800 and 4300 BC. Merimde also refers to the archaeological site of the same name. The culture was concentrated around Merimde Beni Salama , the main settlement site, located in

729-705: Was once common in Lincolnshire . Pierrotage is the infilling material used in French Vernacular architecture of the Southern United States to infill between half-timbering with diagonal braces, which is similar to daub. It is usually made of lime mortar clay mixed with small stones. It is also called bousillage or bouzillage, especially in French Vernacular architecture of Louisiana of the early 1700s. The materials of bousillage are Spanish moss or clay and grass. Bousillage also refers to

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