True story.

Wattle and daub is a 6000 year old (neolithic, even) building technique.

A woven lattice of wooden strips acts as in the same way as reinforcing netting does these days in concrete structures and instead of concrete, our ancestors used a mixture of mud/animal dug and straw to fill out the structure and create a weatherproof wall.

When the first settlers in Australia applied this building technique, they used the native acacia for wattling and referred to it as the “wattle tree”

Name stuck.
(Although it comes from “watul” (Old English – covering, akin to “waetle” – bandage

24 Jul This entry was published on 24 July, 2012 at 13:00. It’s filed under Architecture, History, Mainz and tagged acacia, Australia, wattle and daub. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.