CHAP, xi.] THE DISTRIBUTION OF AMBER. 417 



The Distribution of Amber. 



Amber/ 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 coun- 

 tries, 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 suffici- 

 ently 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 Konigsberg, 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, 



1 For a learned history of amber, See Dr. W. Pierson, Elektron, Berlin, 

 8vo, 1869. 



2 M. Hjalmar Stolpe, Sur I'Origine et le commerce de Vambre jaune dans 

 V antiquity Congress Int. ArcheoL Preliist., Stockholm vol., p. 777. 



2 E 



