Vintage Amber Necklace Surprise

Amber Treasure

I have always liked amber jewellery. Light and soft, in many varied colours and easy to carve Amber is perfect for shaping into Jewellery of all kinds. I’ve bought and sold vintage amber jewellery since the seventies, but real amber jewellery is now becoming very hard to find. This necklace is made from a collection of found amber chips and blocks possibly picked up by a beachcomber somewhere along the east coast of England, where Baltic amber washes-up most days. I’ve found the odd piece myself, on Southwold beach, Suffolk, after spring tides.

Baltic amber really is vintage. Fossilised tree resin it dates from 35 or 40 million years ago and comes in a variety of colours. Admired and used as decoration and jewellery, it was traded all over the ancient world and amber artifacts have been found dating back to 2500 BC.

Around the Baltic region in the late 13th century amber was valued so highly that a man found picking it up on a beach risked a death sentence, unless he held a licence issued by the Teutonic Knights, who owned the monopoly.

Amber was also mined on a large scale. In the 19th century a large part of the mined amber from Koningsberg, East Prussia was used for making varnish.

My amber necklace cost me $10.00. Although scruffy, miss-matched and strangely oily the amber chips looked very cheap and I was certain of a profit. But, like the Roman silver foot, it somehow found it’s way into a drawer. Six months later my fifteen year-old daughter came across the necklace and asked if she could wear it. I said no, because I’ve learned that it can be very hard to get jewellery back from children once it has been lent. She threw it down angrily and stomped off.

With nothing better to do, I decided to count the amber beads and while doing so I came across this perfectly preserved insect (a mosquito?) trapped inside one of the pieces.

Now, like the foot, I find the amber necklace has become impossible to part with. This tiny insect, trapped by a dribble of resin tens of millions of years ago seems like the perfect memento mori and keeping all of these scruffy pieces of amber together has become, for some reason, important. I particularly like the fact that the chip with the insect in it is very hard to find among so many oddly shaped pieces and it can take some time to single it out, even in bright sunlight. Today, to photograph it, I went around and around the string several times anticipating that uplifting moment when it appeared. I was not disappointed.

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