FROM SOIL AND WATER

What is amber?
Formation
Morphology
Inclusions
Colours
From soil and water
Treatment
Real or not?
Qualities
Amber routes
Archeological finds
Amber in
medicine
Relatives throughout the World
Museum in museum

Until the 13th century seacoast inhabitants collected amber from the seashore and later they learned how to obtain amber by combing the seabed with nets. Most often they worked at night lighting the shore with a barrel of tar put on a hill or on a tree. Later bigger fishing nets and in shallow places - special hooks were used for this purpose. With the appearance of the diving suit amber was collected directly from the ground of the sea.

More serious excavations of amber began in 1854 when while deepening the fairway in the Curonian Bay near Juodkrantė big deposits of amber were found. Stantien and Becker, two Jewish businessmen from the Curonian Bay region, founded a company that soon became rich and in 1857 began mechanised excavation of amber - with the help of steam dredgers. It was here that the famous R.Klebbs' collection, which attracted the attention of world anthropologists, was found. People became interested and started to talk and write about this place and about this amber. The industry activity was in full swing. 30-50 tons of amber was excavated per year. After some time the owners of the company bought another amber producing mine in Palvininkai (now Yantarny, Kaliningrad Province) and built an amber-processing factory. It is not surprising that these two merchants became one of the richest industrialists in eastern Prussia, because the Palvininkai deposit contains 90% of the world's amber. Even now 500-700 tons of this mineral per year are excavated in an open mine using modern mining equipment. In Juodkrantė locals still find pieces of amber while digging out the potatoes in their fields that had been enriched with the slit from the bay.

There were many attempts to resume the mining of amber in the Curonian Bay, but the mining methods were primitive and the attempts were quite unsuccessful. For example Count Tiškevičius tried to excavate amber in swamps not far from Palanga. Even though only few hundreds of kilograms of amber were obtained, it was here that the "Palanga treasure" was gathered.

Fishermen of the Curonian Bay used to comb amber from the bottom of the sea with so called "keselė", a net dragged by two boats. The net had special hooks that scratched the seabed and lifted pieces of amber. Then amber got caught by the net. This method of production of amber was used only in Curonian Isthmus and was not known elsewhere.

At the end of the 19th century wealthy merchants abandoned the Curonian Bay deposit and its exploitation was resumed only recently. The amber-bearing layer with an area of 3000 hectares was reached while deepening the fairwater of the Klaipėda Seaport.

Even though many methods of amber production have been used throughout history, and those introduced in the last century were very perspective and efficient, collecting of amber pieces from the shore remains the most popular and lasting.

Even today amber hunters (about 30 persons) on the shore of the Baltic Sea near Karklė or Melnragė, if the cast of the net is successful, can catch 30-50 kg of amber.

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