The Cultural Significance of Amber: From the Trees to the Beach, a Journey

Thanks to an unusual ability to consume the living, amber — or fossilized tree resin — is one of the earth's better-known creations. This yellow, brown, or orange “rock” is a source of microfossils and can be attractive enough to fetch a price all on its own. It’s also one of the more unusual trades around the world, with deposits found in the Dominican Republic, Ukraine, and the Baltic Sea region.

This ancient industry is in flux today, leaving questions about its future, but what about its past? When did trees first grant us their golden bounty?

"Sunstone"

The mining of precious stones has long been on the route of human trade, although the activity isn’t quite as popular as it used to be. We have to look at pop culture tropes like fantasy dwarves' fondness for mining for its prevalence in the media today. 

The American TV show Gold Rush (running since 2010 ) dramatizes mining, while entertainment platforms feature a selection of slot games about extracting things from the earth, including Mine Defender, Mega Mine, and Dyn-A-Miners. 

Rock & Gem magazine describes Baltic amber as "sunstone", "Baltic gold", and "solar stone", noting its honeyed hue. Estimates of amber's color palette suggest more than 200 shades. For example, the RockSeeker website writes that amber in the Dominican Republic is a "deep blue color with fluorescence". 

Perhaps amber’s biggest claim to fame is its presence in Tutankhamen's death mask. King Tut died in 1323 BC, but the stone had been present in the region for more than a millennium, arriving around 3500 BC.

We need to head back to 13,000 BC to find the first peoples who worked with amber. These Paleolithic folk found the unworked gemstone scattered across beaches and turned it into simple ornaments. 

Conifer Forest

Amber is less dense than water, so it floats (an easy way to test its authenticity). Unfortunately, unauthorized mining floods large areas of forest to release the amber buried within, causing significant damage to the environment.

Today, many of the locations with amber present have a different climate from when it was formed. In Europe, Rock & Gem reports that an ancient conifer forest produced the resin we now know as amber during a warmer period of the Earth’s history, depositing it in a glauconite-rich layer of earth. This blue-tinged sediment contains around 4 lbs of amber per cubic meter. 

Research from the American Chemical Society on fossils found in ancient France suggests that the area was a jungle 55 million years ago.

Of course, it’s a long way up from the depths of the earth to a beach. Some amber deposits were re-exposed by the glacial events that produced European seas in the Pleistocene, bringing us back to Paleolithic beachcombers. The precious stone had to wait a while for them to learn how to walk upright first. 

Amber is precious and attractive if you're a human, but less so if you're a mosquito stuck inside. It's one of our longest companions on this earth.