Amber and baltic amber have been used in Europe beginning in the early Upper Paleolithic, although no evidence for widespread interchange that long ago has been discovered. But the gaudiest use of baltic amber has to be the Amber Room, an 11 foot square room constructed in the early 18th century AD in Prussia and presented to the Russian czar Peter the Great in 1767. During prehistoric times, wind and waves coming ashore from the Baltic Sea formed what is known as the Curonian Spit on Poland and Lithuania’s famous “Amber Coast.” Running southwest to northeast, the spit varies in width from 680 yards to 2 miles and is sixty miles long. Unfortunately, the Teutonic monks desired to occupy Gdansk.
The amber market crashed, and Polish craftsmen were not permitted to work at their craft. They would find amber in lakes, rivers, and streams, as well as while digging ditches and wells or ploughing their fields. Between the 10th and 15th centuries AD, the wide variety of amber goods included beads, amulets, dice, pawns, pendants, and rings. All routes led south towards the Black Sea, reaching Rome via the Roman Aquilea tract and Greece via the Hellenic Alexandropolis route. Amber’s specific gravity is slightly over 1 and it floats in saltwater, therefore amber earrings becomes concentrated in estuarine or marine deposits, moved some distance from the original site.

  • Therefore, given copious resin producing trees and appropriate burial conditions, amber is preserved in sedimentary clay, shale, and sandstones associated with layers of lignite, a woody brown coal.The geological reason for the concentration of amber rings in this region has been described by a number of authorities N.O. Holst, the Swedish State Geologist referred to an ancient river called the ‘Alnarps’ which he wanted to call the ‘Amber River’. The geological reason for the concentration of amber rings in this region has been described by a number of authorities N.O. Holst, the Swedish State Geologist referred to an ancient river called the ‘Alnarps’ which he wanted to call the ‘Amber River’.

    The source of most of this baltic amber has for many years presumed to be the extinct species of tree Pinites Succinifer.

  • This conviction has been recently confirmed by Albert Bogdasarov, a Byelorussian mineralogist who recommends the wearing of amber necklaces, especially by children, in areas of intense radiation caused by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.
    Most Baltic amber possesses Succinic acid. From this it can safely be presumed that this tree was capable of producing the resin which would transform over millions of years into amber.Amber is any natural resin which oozed its way out of a tree and eventually fossilized at any time from recent times back to the Carboniferous Period of some 300 million years ago.

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