Hexagon Split, historic quarries, and the art of ecological dreaming

By Savannah Hicks

What do the last Ice Age, historic limestone quarries, and Hexagon Split share in common? While Hexagon’s technology helps mines optimise their workflows, it has also helped to uncover information about the historic workflows of a century-old limestone quarry.

In 2024, artist Ryan Dewey used Hexagon Split Desktop to help examine blast piles along a transect in East Quarry, an historic, abandoned limestone quarry on Kelleys Island, Ohio. In his study, Dewey used Split to investigate quarrying practices in the early 20th century through FIELD OFFICE, his research platform studying the traces of glaciers in the Great Lakes region.

Facing north in the quarry. Unless noted, all images are courtesy of Ryan Dewey, used with permission. For more information, visit www.ryandewey.org

Dewey’s study, “Decoding Quarry Workflows: Uncovering Operational Strategies Through Blast Pile Cluster Analysis in a Historic Limestone Quarry”, is part of a larger project by Dewey, which was acquired by the Nevada Museum of Art. It relates to a granite glacial erratic Dewey found in the Great Lakes region that came from the Canadian Shield during the last Ice Age. A glacial erratic is a glacially deposited rock that differs from the type of rock native to the area in which it rests. Dewey has been working on a multi-year research project to source where this stone came from. His goal is to retrace the rock’s “steps” as it moved down through the last Ice Age and return it to its original home.

While exploring the surface of East Quarry, Dewey discovered pieces of granite that had been moved by glaciers. The quarry workers weren’t interested in these granite pieces, so they piled them into mounds around the interior of the quarry. The granite stones had ultimately been discarded twice; by the movement of the glaciers and by the quarry workers. Mapping the quarry and understanding the placement of these glacial erratics helped Dewey think through the workflows used in this historic quarry, but to statistically validate his observations, he began searching for a tool to test his findings. This is when he found Hexagon Split Desktop, which had the technological capabilities he needed to analyse rock fragment sizes to further understand the workflows in the quarry.

Wave-tumbled limestone on the island’s north shore.

While investigating rock fragment piles on Kelleys Island, Dewey found an iron ring that turned out to be a classification tool used to measure limestone fragments—an historic predecessor to technologies like Hexagon Split. The fragments had to be small enough to pass through a 5.5-inch diameter ring but large enough to be stopped by a 2-inch diameter ring. These limestone fragments were ideal for crushing, with the crushed material then being used to produce cement and flux for steel making. Prior to solutions like Split, quarry operators used this ring system to gauge if their blasting process was producing the right sized fragments for their crusher.

Until Dewey started using Split Desktop to help him measure the crushed stone in the quarry, he didn’t realise the extent of unprocessed piles of limestone abandoned throughout the area. Dewey ultimately discovered eight sites within the quarry where at least more than 10% of the crushed limestone passed the two-inch bounding box, indicating that there may have been additional activity at these sites beyond the primary operation. Whether these piles indicated on-site crushing with a mobile crusher or dump sites for stone crushed off-site is unknown, but the location of these piles helped Dewey determine the direction of travel in the operation of the quarry and deepened the historical knowledge of quarry workflows and processes during the early 20th century.

According to Dewey, Split Desktop allowed him to do something he couldn’t do on his own. In a few months, Split Desktop helped him measure an amount of material that he believes would have taken at least a year using a manual process. Dewey noted that using Hexagon Split Desktop for this project shows that if we apply contemporary technology to historic problems, we can piece together new narratives that may have otherwise been lost to the sands of time.