ASA Digital Art’s observation and theory: in our experience, pieces like ours can turn up in construction material when marine sediment and limestone are quarried and crushed for road base and fill.
South Florida’s near-surface Miami Limestone is porous and permeable, with beds of quartz sand and abundant fossil molds and casts[1]. Crushed and graded, such rock and sediment enters road base and fill.
The scale of the industry is considerable. Florida’s Legislature recognizes that deposits of limestone and sand suitable for construction aggregates, cement and road base are located in limited areas of the state, and it designated the Miami-Dade County Lake Belt as an area for limestone mining[2]. A 2007 Florida Department of Transportation study described the Miami Limestone of the Lake Belt as the hardest and most durable formation available in the state and estimated that about 55 million tons of its rock were processed into aggregate each year, with more than 100 smaller mines elsewhere drawing on other limestone formations and sand[3]. The same study estimated statewide consumption at about 143 million tons of aggregate a year[3].
These figures describe the industry, not our specimens. We do not suggest that any ASA Digital Art specimen came from a particular mine, formation or region.
Our gravel photographs were collected lawfully over about a decade as a personal hobby, on break and lunch time while working on construction projects, with authorization to remove non-building material that would otherwise have been thrown out or buried under pavement; not from any park, preserve, or public land where collecting is restricted.
We do not claim that road base, fill or gravel anywhere contains carbonado, meteorites or diamond of any kind. ASA Digital Art’s specimens are not identified as carbonado. No origin, space or otherwise, is claimed for any ASA Digital Art specimen or Luxurious Specimens lot.