Investigations Into Amber: Proceedings of the International Interdisciplinary Symposium "Baltic Amber and Other Fossil Resins"

In 1997 the latest in a series of international amber conferences took place at the Gdansk Archaeological Museum, as one of many special events marking the city's millennium. The wealth and diversity of the presented research results far outweighed expectations and proved to be of great interest to the attending delegates, who represented a broad range of disciplines. The sudden surge of new developments in amber studies, which began in the 1970s, was repeated in the early 1990s, when research workers were granted access to amber deposits in Sambia. During the Russian communist era the Sambian peninsula was strictly out of bounds to foreign scientists, whilst literature relating to it was only available in Russian and, hence, read almost exclusively in Eastern Bloc countries. The papers published in this volume cover a wide variety of topics. Deposits in Sambia and Ukraine are given comprehensive coverage, whilst earlier debate about the origins and age of Bitterfeld deposits is resumed. The latest results of research into Palaeogene amber-bearing sediments in southern Poland are also feature in this publication. Articles about scale insects in Cretaceous amber and a new species of Heteroptera are accompanied by communiqués about two unique finds: a lizard in Baltic amber and mammalian ichnites. Of interest to comparative analyses is a study on the capture of modern plant inclusions in resin. Archaeology is also well represented in these post-conference proceedings. Papers include evidence not only from Poland, but also from Latvia and Slovakia. The use of amber by Roman period societies in Poland's Kuiavia region is dealt with, the results of a long-standing Italian-Polish collaborative project are presented, and a progress report is given on the production of an up-to-date catalogue of Neolithic amber artefacts from the former collection of the Albert University in Königsberg.