Ancient Amber Trade

The Tertiary fossil resin amber (succinite) was widely prized in prehistoric Europe and the ancient Mediterranean world for ornaments, especially beads, and later—among groups in contact with Greco-Roman civilization—as settings on small bronze items such as brooches. It was valued both for its appearance and for its property of generating static electricity when rubbed, being known to the Greeks as elektron. Although occurring in small quantities in association with lignite deposits in several parts of Europe (e.g., Romania, Sicily), its principal source was the Baltic area, where it occurs in abundance as beach pebbles eroded from Oligocene deposits containing remains of the pine tree Pinus succinifera. The chief concentrations are in western Jutland (Denmark) and around the mouth of the Vistula (Poland) and along the eastern Baltic coasts, although it can be carried by wave action as far as the coasts of eastern England. The role of other sources may become clearer with the application of more sophisticated methods of characterization (hitherto principally infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography) and a better understanding of weathering processes; it is generally agreed, however, that the preponderance of European finds are of material from Baltic sources.

While small quantities are known from Upper Paleolithic sites in several parts of Europe, amber came into more frequent use during the Mesolithic Period in the area of its immediate occurrence, where larger pieces (as individual pendants) were sometimes shaped or engraved. During the earlier part of the Neolithic (before 3500 B.C.) it was used locally for beads, which in the later fourth millennium included distinctive forms such as double-axe beads in Middle Neolithic Denmark or flat discs with radial lines of dots in Poland where they are associated with the Globular Amphora culture. In this latter case, they were perhaps obtained in exchange for salt. The first extensive occurrence of finds outside the source areas, however, belongs to the Bronze Age, when Scandinavia and the Baltic coastlands imported finished items of metalwork from the south in exchange for amber, principally in the form of simple biconical beads. These are found in early-second-millennium graves and hoards in central Germany (Únĕtice culture) and in destruction deposits on fortified settlement sites in the Carpathian Basin (Otomani culture).

Larger quantities of amber, perhaps accompanying northern products such as furs (in exchange for bronze), reached central and western Europe through the intermediacy of the Tumulus cultures (1600–1300 B.C.), where they were used (as in the Wessex culture in Britain) as beads with complex perforations for collars or pendant groups. Some of these traveled the whole breadth of Europe (probably via Italy) to the Mediterranean, where examples occur, reused, in the shaft graves at Mycenae in Greece. While not put into graves in Scandinavia, hoards of raw amber (up to 6.5 pounds [3 kg]) have been recovered there. Scandinavian amber continued to be supplied to Italy and the Aegean via the Urnfield cultures in the period from 1300–750 B.C. following a route marked by rich burials in northern Germany and fortifications in the south. In the Hallstatt period (750-500 B.C.) the supply route shifted eastward, bringing eastern Baltic amber through central Poland (Biskupin) and around the eastern side of the Alps to Italy, where it was widely used by the Etruscans and Picenes as an ornamental material. The route was interrupted in the La Tène period, but resumed in Roman times, when Pliny recorded that the substance was imported “every day of our lives…and floods the market.”[See also Europe, articles on The European Paleolithic Period, The European Mesolithic Period, The European Neolithic Period, The European Bronze Age; Hoards and Hoarding.]

Read more: Prehistoric Amber Trade - elektron, Pinus succinifera http://www.jrank.org/history/pages/6578/Prehistoric-Amber-Trade.html#ixzz0sjU43IMB