Recipe for Daub? A Comparative Petrographic Study of a Common Construction Component in the Maya Area

Summary

Daub is characterized as a mixture of a plastic substance, like natural clay or plaster, and an organic, fibrous binder, which is applied and smoothed against a stick or wood structure to construct a wall. This building strategy is used extensively throughout the world, past and present, yet studies have tended to focus exclusively on identification of component ingredients, rather than compositional and provenance characteristics that offer insights related to resource procurement patterns, variability in daub compositions across time and space, and what contiguous and divergent compositions suggest about development and traditions of construction practices. In this study, we present the results of a comparative petrographic analysis of clay artifacts commonly identified as 'daub' from Late Classic Maya residential buildings situated in three different environmental zones around the site of El Pilar, Belize. We identify and compare the compositional components of artifacts from valley, foothill, and ridgeland environments and consider their compositional and provenance characteristics in light of formal definitions of daub as a building material, daub recipes, and the nature and significance of variability in these artifacts across the landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21688