El uso de las fajinas y los tepes en la arquitectura militar

Abstract

[EN] The use of soil as a construction material has been very important in order to build defensive walls in coherence with the offensive methods. The need of digging moats brings to the military engineer lots of soil that can be used to construct walls. Well known are the wall and adobe techniques but less known are the fatigues and sod walls. Due to their fastness, economy, high availability of materials, and easy construction this two techniques were used to build walls and also by sappers to build trenches and close broken walls. Soil plus some woody plants or fodder, is able to form strong and durable walls that, thanks to its low compactness, could form the perfect volumes to absorb the cannonball impacts (even better than brick and stone walls). We will analyze these techniques and their solutions as described in treatises and some heritage examples.