Prehistoric Amber Ornaments from the Żuławy Wiślane, Northern Poland: A Raw Material Perspective

Because of its beauty and unique properties, amber has fascinated people for thousands of years. With the holiday season now officially underway and many of us likely to spend at least a moment on the marine coast, today’s article focuses on the role amber played among communities living in the particular area of northern Poland during the Late Neolithic period. We will explore how its selection – based on colour, transparency, and structure – reflected the aesthetic and technological preferences of prehistoric craftspeople and users. These observations will then be compared with contemporary Polish trends in jewellery, aiming to highlight some subtle analogies between the past and the present. Join us on this fascinating journey through time, aesthetics, and technique, which proves that the choice of amber was never accidental. The inspiration for this article comes from recent research on some of the products from an amber workshop that existed around 4,500 years ago in the Żuławy Wiślane region, published by researchers from the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw and the Museum of Earth in Warsaw Polish Academy of Sciences, in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift.

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Not only Göbeklitepe

Culture and Information Counsellor’s Office the Embassy of the Republic of Türkiye, The University of Warsaw and Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency (TGA) will host an archaeology seminar and photo exhibition on April 19, 2023, at the University of Warsaw. The aim of this event is to give more attention to the recent archaeological excavations at Proto-Neolithic archaeological sites in the region of Şanlıurfa, producing evidence that the famous constructions at Göbeklitepe were not exceptional, but typical for the formative period of farming societies.

Source: Culture and Information Counsellor’s Office the Embassy of the Republic of Türkiye

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The origin of Late Neolithic amber ornaments in Poland

The area of the south-eastern shores of the Baltic Sea was in prehistory and is still today an area abundant in deposits of raw amber, as indicated, among other things, by the numerous Late Neolithic (3rd millennium BC) amber workshops and amber ornaments found on archaeological sites located in the Vistula Fens, south of the Gulf of Gdańsk. Therefore, it is puzzling that relatively few finished amber ornaments come from both these areas and the nearby region of north-eastern Poland. Among the few contemporary known ornaments are those from sites: Ząbie 10, Supraśl 3 and Supraśl 6, which are unique in this part of the prehistoric world. The selected artifacts were thus subjected to stylistic and technological analysis in order to determine where they were made, also taking into account the type of raw material used. The research showed that although the amber ornaments were most likely produced from material extracted in the south-eastern Baltic coastal zone (succinite, gedanite and gedano-succinite), they have no direct analogues there. 

Uszkodzone i niedokończone na różnych etapach obróbki wytwory bursztynowe pochodzące z warsztatów bursztyniarskich w okolicach wsi Niedźwiedziówka © K. Kwiatkowska, na licencji CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Damaged and unfinished amber artefacts at various stages of processing from amber workshops near the Niedźwiedziówka village
© K. Kwiatkowska, on licence CC BY-ND 4.0

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