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I was reminded of a neat word today and I thought I'd introduce y'all to it:
tabby: A mixture of oyster shells, lime, sand, and water used as a building material. (AHD)
Used primarily along the southern Atlantic coast in the 16th - 18th centuries, tabby is a generally vernacular building material, and is not the most durable material (relatively speaking, compared to other traditional building methods) so little survives today. The usual definitions of the word (the cat and the cloth) come from an Arabic toponym, but this definition seems to be from an alternate source (although there are Moors involved so...). I found the following from the Beaufort County (SC) Public Library:
Tabby is a cement made from lime, sand and oyster shells. Its origin is uncertain: although early documents record Indian burial vaults with walls made of oyster shells and lime, no such structures have survived. It is likely that Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers first brought tabby (which appears as "tabee", "tapis", "tappy" and "tapia" in early documents) to the coasts of what would become South Carolina and Georgia. Tapia is Spanish for "mud wall", and, in fact, the mortar used to caulk the earliest cabins in this area was a mixture of mud and Spanish Moss. There is evidence that North African Moors brought tabby to Spain when they invaded that kingdom: a form of tabby is used in Morocco today and some tabby structures survive in Spain, though in both instances it is granite, not oyster shells, that is used.
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a generally vernacular building material
Dave - interesting word and etymology on tabby, but I've no more to contribute on that point, so, by your leave, I'll take the thread in a completely different direction.
Your use of "vernacular" here caught my eye, as I've always understood it to be a term applied to language, per the first three senses given by AHD:
1. Native to or commonly spoken by the members of a particular country or region. 2. Using the native language of a region, especially as distinct from the literary language: a vernacular poet. 3. Relating to or expressed in the native language or dialect.
However, it's clear that you were using it in a sense that makes great sense, but that was new to me:
4. Of or being an indigenous building style using local materials and traditional methods of construction and ornament, especially as distinguished from academic or historical architectural styles.
So that was interesting - but what I really found interesting was the etymology:
From Latin vernculus, native, from verna, native slave, perhaps of Etruscan origin.
Nice use of the Etruscan in your post, Dave.
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old hand
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OK Flatlander, both the Moor and Spanish connections immediately made me think of Sardinian, so I did some wandering through the online Sardinian dictionary (quite difficult since I don't know Sardinian and that which I know is not the same "branch" as what most of the dictionary is written in). And I got (struggled with translating the definition): Tabbiche or tabbicu: A layer of wall, thin wall, of half(?), made of brick or other, also of [some kind of] canes. So it looks like it's a wall-word, but you'll have to wait until I can ask my live Sardinian dictionary (aka my father) if he knows such a word, and what he knows it to mean. Thanks for the fun challenge! 
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Carpal Tunnel
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In a site about St.Augustine FL, there is mentioned a very old fort still standing, that was made from seashells excavated from a very large deposit of them plus lime presumably made by firing some of the shell in a oven. All up and down the eastern seabord the colonists used seashore mounds of shells left by the aborigines to make mortar for chimneys.
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stranger
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Carpal Tunnel
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This tabby made me think of the wattle and daub I heard about in a spiel at Plymouth (Plimouth, take your pick--!). I just check MW online, and there I read that daub was a kind of clay--no shells were mentioned there--but it was surprising that the reference date for the entry was 1808, long after Plymouth colony. Hmmmmm....what gives here?
Also, I'm not going to start a new thread because someone might know here whether shells were in the daub.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear WW: "Wattle and daub" is a lot older than Plymouth,MA. One of the most pressing needs of ancient housing was some semblance of air-tightness. So gooey clay patted onto a criss-cross of finger sized rods from plants growing in marshy areas helped a lot. Of course when the clay dried, it shrank and cracked. But it was relatively resistant to fire, and cracks would have second application of very wet clay. Here is a URL to a modern version of wattle and daub. But they are cheating and using lathes that would not have been available until fairly recently! http://www.wealddown.co.uk/poplar-cottage-construction-thatch-wattle-and-daub.htm
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Carpal Tunnel
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Main Entry: wattle and daub
Function: noun
Date: 1808
: a framework of woven rods and twigs covered and plastered with clay and used in building construction http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionaryNow I wonder what that 1808 date means here in the online entry?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear WW: Perhaps the 1808 was supposed to be 1808 BC. But I'll bet it's a hell of a lot older than that. In places where skins were hard to get, it didn't take a rocket scientist to plug gaps in huts with damp soil or clay if clay were available. Some of the sources I looked at also mentiond "cob" which was a mixture of clay and straw. This reminded me of Biblical complaint about difficulty in making bricks without straw. It was a long time before I dound out that straw used with poor quality clay was used for building blocks. "Readers of the Bible may be reminded of a section in the Book of Exodus known as "bricks without straw." In this passage, Moses asks Pharaoh for time off for the Hebrew slaves to pray in the desert, as God commanded. Pharaoh becomes enraged by what he sees as the slaves' laziness, and he orders that they no longer be given straw to make bricks. Yet they must produce the same quota of bricks as before. The slaves would have to find the straw (its chemicals hardened the mud used to make bricks) for themselves. Of course, the slaves could not scour the countryside for straw and make bricks at the same time. But God was on their side, and what followed is well-known: the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians, the Exodus and the Promised Land. " For the Biblical passage, which is rather long, see: http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?passage=exodus+5
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
Main Entry: wattle and daub
Function: noun
Date: 1808
: a framework of woven rods and twigs covered and plastered with clay and used in building construction
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
Now I wonder what that 1808 date means here in the online entry?
I assume it means the first recorded use of the expression. So what was the technique called before then?
Bingley
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