What would people living on rocky terrain with access to a river use as building materials?

Question

I'm looking for architectural inspiration for a city I'm designing, and I wonder what kind of building material would be used by the inhabitants.

They live at the foot of a mountain, relatively close to the sea, in a temperate forested region. A small river runs near the town, possibly giving access to silt and clay. The setting is medieval with minor magic (think heat or water producing, not gravity reversing or stuff like that).

The people living there have been for a few hundred years. They follow an animistic religion but are not (yet) based on any specific real world people.

What building materials would they most likely use? Cut stone for its durability? Mudbrick or clay for being quick? At the moment I'm leaning towards mudbrick / clay, but I just want to make sure.

Answer 1

The setting you describe has access to clay, stone, and timber, medieval technology, and low-level magic. Likely construction techniques:

• Cheap construction is likely to be some variation on wattle and daub. Cutting timber is labor-intensive, and shaping it into boards is even more so. Wattle-and-daub construction economizes on timber by only using it for the frame.
• Durable construction is likely to be mortared fieldstone. Mountains have vast amounts of broken stone lying around on them, and it's a lot easier to search for pieces that fit together reasonably well than it is to actively shape them to fit.
• You probably won't get brick construction. Fired bricks are typically made from a mix of clay and sand, and you don't mention sand as an available material. Sun-dried bricks typically use clay and straw, which you have, but sun-dried bricks don't hold up very well in wet climates. If you do have sand, firing your bricks using magic may be less labor-intensive than firing them using wood.

Answer 2

Since highest transport tech would be wheelbarrow or river barge. Bulk construction materials would be sourced locally, as in within 1 Km at most 5 Km. Anything else would be too expensive.

Initial buildings would have been whatever is quick. ie wood. But to minimize maintenance and prestige reasons stone would be the building material of choice for the wealthy. Brick would be of course an option depending on resources. Unfired mud-brick //rammed earth would not be good long term.

But a mix of stone, wood, brick etc. woudl be expected.

Side note the town would be beside/on the river not 'near' because it means significant economic boost to have access to the river for transport.

Answer 3

Looking at the UK and Ireland, I would guess stone.

If the stone is breaking in relatively angular pieces, dry stone walling will work even for walls of buildings. Stone that is a little less easy to stack can be glued together with mud (or dung in combination with mud.) Also forest materials can be used to fill gaps, log houses in Sweden, for instance, use moss, which can also be used somehow with stone.

Wood would require a lot more work and is likely only used for those things stone does not work well, beams and doors (and possibly door and window frames.)

Answer 4

Dung.

Stone. Yes, yes. Medieval buildings made of stone. How novel. And wood. Buildings made of wood? Bizarrité! What strange new world is this?

Nay, young JasperMW. Nay. You need new ideas to make your world a fresh and entrancing thing. That is why your people build their houses using dung.

https://thegate.boardingarea.com/homes-constructed-with-cow-manure-in-villages-of-the-maasai-people-of-kenya-yes/

It started to make sense to me: cow manure is apparently waterproof. Reinforced with wood from dead tree trunks and branches, it is sturdy. It is obviously opaque. It apparently can insulate against the elements. It is free and plentiful, as the Maasai people have their own large herd of cattle.

Cow manure is just proof of principle. Your people collect and use their own dung as well as whatever other dung they can find which is mostly from the domestic marmots they keep. Dung is also collected from the herds of fiercely feral pygmy goats that wander their land and this is a rite of passage for your young people. When it is building season your people augment their diets with roughage, to make the dung more substantial. It is a community effort; the Dunging. Visitors are welcome and are always kept well fed during the Dunging.

Like the Maasai your people fortify their cunning cottages dung using plant materials - but rather than twigs they use aromatic herbs and flowers they collect in the nearby alpine meadows, as well as toasted hair from their own bodies.

Answer 5

Stone, Mortar, and Limeplaster

They live at the foot of a mountain... a small river runs near the town

As other questions have already pointed out, local stone is much easier to gather and stack, than wood is to chop down and carve, and this river will give the the best kind of stone for stacking. Anywhere you have a river that runs through a mountain, you get plentiful naturally occurring, ready to use stone. The faster flowing waters of mountain rivers wash away smaller sediments and leave behind riverbeds full of smooth stones that are just the right size to be used without needing any shaping at all. Just go out to the river with a wagon, load up, and come home with plenty of building materials.

While some slower moving parts of the river may produce silt and clay, these will likely be the exception more than the rule due to the proximity of the mountain.

In the Medieval period, the technology to make mortar was very well known. There were 2 general types: Ash and Limestone. Ash mortar was cheaper because all you needed for the cement was wood ash. Since every house was heated by and meal cooked by wood burning, ash was a very plentiful resource that was recycled into many things including mortar. Mixed into a mud it will cure to form a low grade concreate that will not dissolve in water like mud would, but is more prone to cracking from normal ware and tear than limestone mortar.

The higher quality mortar is made by heating limestone until it is red-hot and then dosing it with water which creates a chemical reaction forming quicklime. When mixed with mud, this creates a high grade mortar that can easily last for hundreds if not thousands of years. Limestone will be very common in a place like this; so, if you factor in that magic is used for heat instead of burning wood, then this may easily be the most used kind of mortar since you wont need to burn a lot of wood to get it up to heat, and wood ash will be less common with fewer reasons to burn wood in bulk.

Wood will only be used for widely used for roofing and doors, and maybe for windows. Another thing of note is that a lot of medieval architecture did not look like it looks today. Home owners would often coat the outside of both stone and wooden buildings with a lime plaster made of the same material they used for mortar, to give thier walls a smooth white finish. So most of your middle-to-upper class homes should be distinguished from your lower class stone and mortar homes by having a stucco looking façade instead of bare stonework.

Answer 6

After all the snooty replies, i think your best bet would be to honor the Incas who made buildings that have been quake proof for possibly millenia and also make method more efficient because it had to be labor intensive. Or else places were built by aliens!