Lwah

The wooden side boards of the pisé formwork, the basic working tool of rammed-earth construction. A pair of lwah boards is held parallel by transverse stretchers (themselves often called tabut in Tamazight) at the chosen wall thickness and clamped tight before the earth is rammed. The same root l-w-ḥ gives both the Arabic name for the technique (luh) and the Tamazight alleuh, and one persistent ambiguity in the literature is whether early sources mean the technique itself or the formwork board when they use these terms.