“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, the only beetles catching the attention of associate professor Curt W. Beck and his students were ancient and preserved in the amber they were studying. 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 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 undergrad to compare the infrared spectra of archaeological finds with those of about 2000 naturally occurring fossil resins, a “library” which they created. These results have been reported in more than 150 publications, many of them with undergraduate student coauthors.

Amber from China found to have European origins…
With the discovery of amber deposits in Liaoning Province in northeast China, the question arose: Were the amber artifacts of the Liao dynasty made from local sources? Recently, the Amber Research Lab was able to answer this question. Using infrared spectroscopy, and requiring only milligrams of sample material, the ARL researchers analyzed amber artifacts from the Liao dynasty. The findings have shown that amber used to make these artifacts was Baltic, and traded from Northern Europe to the Far East a thousand years ago.

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