In the work reported in this article, were determined the shielding capabilities of three artisanal bricks used
massively in the construction industry in Mexico. The linear attenuation coefficients for photons between 1 keV
and 100 GeV are reported; and the half-value layers for energies used in the medical field, show that the three
typical artisanal bricks have good shielding capabilities for photons below 50 keV. We compared the effective
atomic numbers of one of our bricks against two widely used materials in the construction industry, and our
results suggest that the greater the effective atomic number, the less material attenuation capacity. A comparison
of the half-value layer of one of our bricks against the half-value layers of two clay bricks with different percentages
of fly ash particles published in the literature, suggests that in the region between 0.001 and 2.8 MeV,
all the three bricks have practically the same attenuation capacity and that from 2.8 MeV to 100 GeV the clay
bricks with different percentages of fly ash particles, need less material to show the same attenuation capacity
than our artisanal bricks. Energy Dispersed X-Ray Fluorescence suggests that regardless of the number of constituent
elements in a sample, a critical mass per atom is required to have a positive impact on density; and as a
consequence, in the capacity of attenuation of the materials. Normalized half-value layers suggest on the other
hand, that the uncooked bricks have better shielding capabilities than cooked.