WEEK 9 LAB DATA GROUP B

This week Group B worked on a wattle and daub panel for one of the long sides of the house. It took about an hour to gather and strip the materials to build it, and since we were in an area with somewhat slim pickings for willow, we ended up with a few ash saplings and most of the willow was rather thin and short, about 3/4 to 1 thumb thickness at the bottom and about six feet tall. Once the material was collected, we had 34 poles.

At the field, we set up the zales for the hurdles. We used two poles from Group D as zales to supplement our own collected poles, since they had collected wider and taller ash saplings than we had. After we collected appropriate zales from the bottom of their saplings, we returned the tops to Group D for their own use. We sharpened the bottoms of the zales into stakes and hammered them into the ground, using Annie as a reference measurement. Lying down, the posts of the house were at her heels and her shoulder; we used this distance to place the outer two zales and placed the remaining three zales equidistant between them. This took probably forty minutes to an hour, with Noah and I working on the bottom third, and Annie finishing the top two thirds. I regret to say that I don’t have more precise timing, since I was otherwise occupied while Annie was working, and by the time I returned the panel was in place against the house.

Daubing took the remainder of our time, and since I had a cut on my finger I didn’t want to get muddy, Noah was the only one working on daubing the side of the house during the lab period. At this point, mud was the limiting factor, since we only had buckets to fetch the mud from the river. Noah got five to seven handfuls of daub applied by the end of the lab period, covering almost all the way across the bottom of the panel. When we came back the next day, with wheelbarrows and shovels to transport the mud, and two people working on daubing our panel, the hay became the more limiting factor to making the daub. By the time the class period was ending and we held the ceremony for Two Sixteen, the daub had made it’s way about a foot and a half up the wall, covering it halfway. Looking straight on, the thatch covered the part of the wall that didn’t have daub.