Crossword clues for jacal
jacal
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Jacal \Ja*cal"\ (h[aum]*k[aum]l"; 239), n. [Amer. Sp., fr. Mex. xacalli.] In Mexico and the southwestern United States, a kind of plastered house or hut, usually made by planting poles or timber in the ground, filling in between them with screen work or wickerwork, and daubing one or both sides with mud or adobe mortar; also, this method of construction.
Wiktionary
n. a wattle-and-mud hut common in Mexico and the south-western US
Wikipedia
The jacal is an adobe-style housing structure historically found throughout parts of the southwestern United States and Mexico. This type of structure was employed by some Native people of the Americas prior to European colonization and was later employed by both Hispanic and Anglo settlers in Texas and elsewhere.
Typically, a jacal consisted of slim close-set poles tied together and filled out with mud, clay and grasses. More sophisticated structures, such as those constructed by the Anasazi, incorporated adobe bricks—sun-baked mud and sandstone.
Jacal construction is similar to wattle and daub. However, the "wattle" portion of jacal structures consists mainly of vertical poles lashed together with cordage and sometimes supported by a pole framework, as in the pit-houses of the Basketmaker III period of the Ancestral Puebloan (aka Anasazi) Indians of the American Southwest. This is overlain with a layer of mud/adobe (the "daub"), sometimes applied over a middle layer of dry grasses or brush which functions as insulation.
Usage examples of "jacal".
The street ended against a precipice three or four chains high, and perhaps had properly ended sooner, for the last few score paces I had walked had been on what was probably no more than a private path to the miserable jacal of mud and sticks before which I stood.
I stood, I was about to turn away in disgust when a child slipped out of the jacal, and sidling toward me in a half bold, half fearful way, watching me with its right eye only, extended a small and very dirty hand in the universal gesture of beggars.
That night in the jacal it was not brilliant, but it glowed with so deep a blue that the light itself seemed almost a clearer darkness.
There was a jacal at the back of the court: a larger structure than the hovel in which the sick girl and her brother had suffered, but built of sticks and mud in the same fashion.
There was no confusion of memory, but for a time a confusion of mind, in which the boy was merged in that other boy, Jader, who had lived with his dying sister in the jacal upon the cliff in Thrax.
On arriving at the jacal, we were admitted, but a gloom like the pall of death seemed to envelop the old Mexican couple.
I sifted the actions of the magicians, and of the man who had accosted me outside the jacal of the sick girl, and of many other men and women I had known, seeking for a key that would unlock all hearts.
The walls were made of the same mud-brick construction as the jacals of the indios, but many times thicker and higher.
Those somewhat less well off had their houses higher, the middle class in general had theirs higher still, and so on until the very poorest dwelt just below the fortifications at the cliff tops, often in jacals of mud and reeds that could be reached only by long ladders.