The Distribution of Amber.
Amber,[1] although it has ministered to the superstition, luxury, and vanity of mankind rather than to any useful end, has played a most important part in the history of civilisation. It has caused a trade to spring up by which new arts and new ideas were introduced from other countries, that benefited not merely the regions where the amber occurs, but those also traversed by the amber caravans. It was highly prized by the civilised peoples of the Mediterranean, and was used by the inhabitants of Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and France, for personal ornaments, in the Neolithic and succeeding ages. In the Bronze age in Britain it was used in pieces sufficiently large to be fashioned into cups, as, for example, that found in a tumulus at Hove, near Brighton. It becomes, therefore, an interesting question to ascertain the localities whence it was widely dispersed over Europe (A of Fig. 168).
The first and most important amber-producing region to be noticed is that of Königsberg, and the surrounding district of Samland,[2] in Eastern Prussia, in which the fossil resin occurs in a pine forest below the level of the sea that extended in the Meiocene age northwards to join the wooded slopes of Iceland, on the one hand, and those of Spitzbergen on the other (see Map, Fig. 6, p. 41), It is found in vast abundance on the sea-shore, and has formed an article of commerce from the earliest historic times. It is picked up also along the coast of West Prussia and Pomerania.
