About Amber

Research

The study of amber is of scientific importance in the field of archaeometry, the branch of archaeology that applies modern analytical methods to the study of material remains of past cultures. 

Over the past four decades the Amber Research Laboratory (ARL) has made a significant contribution to the field of organic archaeometry. The origin of more than 6000 ancient amber artifacts from Europe, the Near East and China have been studied. An example of a study is the analysis of amber carvings from the Liao Dynasty in northeast China which has been shown to have come to the Far East from Northern Europe a thousand years ago.

Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectrometry and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS) are used to study the chemical composition of ambers and resins to infer the botanical sources of  archaeological materials. These methods have led to the study of tars and pitches, which are organic materials used in shipbuilding and to line amphorae in which wine and pickled fish were transported in the Mediterranean region. For example the tars from the Mediterranean shipwrecks were determined to be mostly from the Aleppo pine (Pinus Halepensis).

Comparative studies have also been carried out on pine tars made under controlled laboratory conditions. These studies made it possible to determine the technology and temperatures used in making ancient tars and pitches.

Two studies on ancient food remains were carried out in the Amber Research Laboratory (ARL): a) remains of the funerary feast of King Midas of Phrygia, b) organic residues in Minoan and Mycenaean pottery. The latter study was presented at an exhibition in the Greek National Museum in the summer of 1999.

Select Findings

It will, of course, forever remain a secret…”
After finding thousands of amber beads in the royal graves in the citadel of Mycenae in 1876, celebrated German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann wrote: “It will, of course, forever remain a secret to us whether this amber is derived from the coast of the Baltic Sea or from Italy”.

And for almost a century, it did remain a secret.
Then in the 1960s, when Vassar turned 100 and some students were enthusing over the cutest Beatle, elsewhere on campus, in a chemistry lab, Professor Curt W. Beck (founder of Amber Research laboratory) and his students were studying beetles preserved in amber from millions of years ago. Beck and his students found that the infrared spectra of amber and other fossil resins could be used to determine their origin, thus revealing the secret of the amber beads and of so many other ancient remains.

Where were the Mycenaeans getting these huge quantities of amber, three and a half millennia ago?
We now know that, during the Bronze Age, this amber came from what is now Denmark. Under the direction of Professor Beck and his research associate Edith Stout, the Amber Research Laboratory at Vassar College has determined the origin of more than 6000 ancient amber artifacts from Greece, Italy, Portugal, France, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, as well as from the Near East. Beck and Stout used a computer program written by a Vassar undergraduate to compare the infrared spectra of archaeological finds with those of about 2000 naturally occurring fossil resins, from which an in-house reference “library” was created. These results have been reported in more than 150 publications, many of them with undergraduate student coauthors.
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