Need for a means to control pavement denseness for bituminous concrete construction in Ohio was indicated several years ago by failure of some late season paving. The paving that failed carried up to 20 per cent voids into the winter. Such paving was easy prey to freezing and thawing, and stripping. The proportion of paving that failed to the total paving was small for any one construction season, although one single course resurfacing was almost entirely lost. While it is most important to correct conditions causing critical void contents, consideration must first be given to the accurate measurement of void contents. Several methods are available for the measurement of paving density. Perhaps the most widely recognized is the ASTM method for the determination of specific gravity of compressed bituminous mixtures (D 1188). Data presented in this paper compare specific gravities of cores obtained by the ASTM method, modified by dipping cores in paraffin and time- of-dry weighing, with specific gravities of the same cores obtained by three other methods. Methods are also available to determine the specific gravity of bituminous coated aggregates. For aggregates nonabsorptive to both bituminous material and water, any of the specific gravities shown in ASTM methods of determining specific gravity of coarse and fine aggregates (C 127 and C 128) can be used to determine accurate theoretical maximum densities. For aggregates with bituminous material absorption equal to water absorption, bulk specific gravity from the above methods can be used to determine accurate theoretical maximum densities. A method was presented in 1942 by Nevitt and Krchma (1) to estimate the absorption of bituminous material for aggregates by their absorptions of kerosine. The same year Goshorn and Williams (2) presented a method for the direct measurement of the amount of bituminous material absorbed by aggregate immersed in bitumen. Each of these methods was most useful for voids computations when the method accurately indicated the amount of bituminous material absorption that occurred in aggregates as they were coated in the mix.