Los ladrillos del recinto amurallado de Talamanca de Jarama, Madrid: Criterios para su diferenciación

The walled complex of Talamanca de Jarama has a long history of wars that have destroyed it several times. Due to this fact, the Wall has gone through many reconstruction and enlargement processes (9th 13th 14th and 17th century), to which the restorations performed during the last century (20th) must be added. The main building materials are bricks together with rammed-earth and stones. The bricks studied under Polarizing Microscopy (OM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), spectrocolourimetry, ultrasounds and mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP), allowed us to distinguish five types, each of them belongs to different manufacturing periods. The oldest bricks (type I) and the most recent ones (type V), are those that differentiate the most. The five types of bricks show heterogeneities due to a deficient manufacture, which is responsible for their decay process, despite the fact that these bricks have been placed recently, during the last intervention.