85% of natural asphalt is found in the Western hemisphere; the most famous asphalt field is probably the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, but the largest reserves are in Alberta, which hold an estimated 2.2 trillion barrels. In addition to the natural reserves, asphalt has, for the last 100 years, primarily been produced by refining crude oil residue. Asphalt’s most common use is as the binder in blacktop; aggregate makes up the remaining 95% of the dark mix we see on roads and highways. […]

The largest antique source of asphalt was the Dead Sea, where chunks of seafloor asphalt periodically broke off and rose to the surface. In ancient Egypt, this asphalt was used to waterproof boats […], as well as roads, canals, and roofs, and it was prized enough that Alexander the Great’s general Antigonus started – and lost – a war with the Nabataean Arabs over the Dead Sea’s asphalt. […]

Asphalt was rare in road construction until it hit the big time in 1867 with the asphalting of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Soon Washington was an “asphalt city,” and the quiet, smooth streets inspired other cities to follow suit. Paving became ever more important with the popular rise of bicycles and then cars. At the turn of the century, refined asphalt was developed and largely supplanted natural asphalt due to its higher quality and volume. This was also the time when concrete emerged as a road paving material, and a competition between concrete and asphalt emerged […].

O’Reilly closely associates war and asphalt. In World War II, asphalt served many purposes. From the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to Tinian in the Northern Marianas, Navy construction battalions used asphalt to construct airfields and roads on short notice. Over 17,000 tons of asphalt were brought ashore during the Normandy landings. […] During the Vietnam War, building asphalt runways was fundamental to the American policy of aerial bombardment. Asphalt has continued to be the material of choice for ad-hoc roads and runways built during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Text by: Alexander Luckmann. “Asphalt and Sand: A Material History of Extraction and Consumption.” Published online at Cleveland Review of Books. 13 May 2022.