Minisode 5: Amber

This minisode delves into the million-year-old material that is amber. Come for the references to Jurassic Park, stay in spite of me using the word "excrete."

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I'm your hostess with maybe not the mostest, I don't want to make claims to that, but definitely an adequate amount of whatever the mostist is. Not sure where that came from, but anyway, that mostest includes a PhD in art history, which I use to tell you stuff about things. It's in the title, people. This episode is a mini sode, which I categorize as any episode under 30 minutes. This particular mini sode is a compliment to episode 36, which covers the makings and the mysteries of the Amber Room. While I originally intended to talk about Amber in that episode, given that it's, you know, pretty important in the scheme of things, it got way too long, as my episodes are wont to do. That's how we got here, to the part where I tell you stuff about a material, its myths, and its masterworks. Amber. The so-called Gold of the North and its colorful history. I first learned about Amber the same way I think most kids did, by watching the 1994 cinematic classic Jurassic Park. In that movie, a cartoon strand of DNA called Mr. DNA tells us all about Amber and how it was essential in the park's plot to clone dinosaurs. That was a very bad idea. Don't believe me? Well, there's like 10 movies attesting to the fact that it was indeed a very bad idea. I love those movies. The book series is also very good. The dinosaur part of Mr. DNA's monologue is fiction, I hope. But the rest of what Mr. DNA says is pretty on point. Amber is categorized as a gemstone, but once upon a time, it started its life as tree resin, which is not the same thing as tree sap of the syrup-making variety, though both are oozy and sticky. Sap comes from the inner parts of the tree, whereas resin is instead stored closer to the surface and acts as a kind of protective agent. When a tree gets a cut or a boo-boo, the tree excretes, yes, excretes, resin to protect that area. That includes when insects would attempt to nibble on the tree's bark, only to get stuck in this oozy-goozy resin. If you go to a natural history museum, it's fairly common for them to have a hunk of amber on display with various bugs and or small historic creatures stuck in it. A lot like the piece of amber that's in that one guy's cane from again, Jurassic Park. This fact of amber's former existence turns amber into a kind of looking glass through which we can peer back hundreds of thousands of years to look at something frozen in time, which is precisely what those specimens are. They are pieces of prehistoric history entombed forever in this golden haze. Amber is found all over the world, though it is particularly prevalent in andor associated with the Baltic region of northern/slash eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, that part of the world was covered in massive forests of pine trees that at some point got majorly flooded, thereby becoming the Baltic Sea, leaving all of those pine trees buried under dirt and water and other stuff. Over the course of, again, literally millions of years, the resin secreted by those trees hardens to the point of becoming amber. Some people refer to this process as fossilization, becoming a fossil, like all those dyno bones. But that typically involves a change in the chemical composition of something, which does not happen in the case of amber. Its physical makeup is very similar to what it was as resin. It's just now super, super, super hard. To the point where it's categorized as a gemstone. That amber is brought to the surface when violent storms roll through the area and make the sea angry, thereby dislodging hunks of amber. Thanks to its former life as tree resin, that hunk contains hundreds of thousands of microscopic air bubbles that allow it to float to the surface, where humans can yoinkity yoink it from the water and turn it into all kinds of crazy stuff, from jewelry beads to altars, to entire rooms. For thousands of years, that's how amber was harvested from the sea. It is for that reason that people in the olden days sometimes referred to amber as seastone. Today, most amber is sourced from mines, though that's a fairly recent development. Recent as in, you know, the past few hundred years. The fairly random way in which amber surfaces makes harvesting it a pretty fickle business. While you could probably anticipate finding some amber after a storm, there was no telling how much you'd find if you found any at all. That made amber incredibly rare and super duper expensive. For a while, amber was even referred to as Baltic Gold or the Gold of the North, and in some places it was exponentially more expensive than gold. Because of that, its collection and sale was highly regulated, to the point where selling the stuff without permission could result in execution. You could literally lose your head over it. And despite claims that amber has healing powers of some kind, the biggest hunk in the world ain't gonna make your head grow back. Speaking of selling amber, amber has been a commodity for thousands of years. We don't know when it was first used by people, but unworked lumps of raw amber have been found in Paleolithic cave dwellings that date back tens of thousands of years. But it isn't until the tail end of the Stone Age, so like 12,000 years ago, that there is more compelling and convincing evidence of people working and appreciating amber as a precious material. We know that because in some places it's common to find amber in Stone Age burial sites, suggesting that it was a pretty big deal. That's a top tip. If you want to know what people cared about, look at what they're buried with. That's usually a pretty good indication. Because while they say you can't take it with you, you can certainly try. From the Stone Age on, Baltic amber was so popular that it was bordered all over the damn place. Amber goods were common in the Mediterranean during Greek and Roman times, and Baltic amber goods specifically have been found as far away as ancient Egyptian burial sites, showing just how far some of those goods traveled. We know that because archaeologists and ooh, jet gemstonologists? What is it? What are they called? Gemologists, that sounds made up, but apparently it's what they're called. So gemologists have a way of determining where amber was sourced, which is pretty nifty. The point here is that Baltic amber was the goat of all of the ambers. It was the greatest of all time, and traders trafficked it far and wide, which is not to say it was cheap. The Roman historian Pliny, whereas my bestie once referred to him, Pliny, writes that a small piece of amber would fetch more money than a quote-unquote healthy slave, which is upsetting. In addition to inspiring trade, amber also inspired myths. The Roman poet Ovid tells us one such myth in his most well-known work, Metamorphoses, in which he recounts the Greek myth of the Heliades. Not sure if I'm saying that one right, but I went for it. That myth revolves around seven sisters, who, as part of a much longer story, sought out the body of their recently deceased brother. They then built him a tomb and spent months mourning his loss, until one day they transformed into poplar trees, ones that would be forever rooted to the place where they buried their brother. And for the rest of time, the only human attribute that those woman trees retained was the ability to weep. What did they weep? You guessed it, amber. Ovid wrote, quote, The tears flowed on. As they dripped from the new formed poplars, the sun's rays set them to beads of amber, which fell in the gleaming river who sent them to be worn by the brides of Latium. End quote. It might just be a coincidence, but this myth seems to demonstrate that the Greeks and Romans knew amber comes from trees. They got the species wrong, amber comes from pine trees, not poplar trees, but even so, trees. Other ancient peoples also had myths about amber, some of which are more on the mark than others. In ancient Lithuania, there's a legend about amber that has something of a little mermaid vibe to it. It tells the story of a mermaid goddess who lived in an amber palace under the sea. Despite having a fiancee, this goddess falls in love with a hot fisherman, as one does. She somehow brings this hot fisherman down to live with her on the bottom of the ocean in this amber palace. Not sure how he didn't drown, but whatever. The fact that she brought down this hot fisherman to live with her pissed off her fiancé, who just happened to be the god of thunder, aka Lithuanian Thor. In a total jerk move, Lithuanian Thor javelins a shaft of lightning into the water, blowing up this goddess's amber palace to kill her lover. As if that wasn't bad enough, Lithuanian Thor chains our mermaid goddess to the ruins of her palace, where she's destined to cry tears of amber for her dead beloved. Her tears of amber and the ruins of her amber palace are what float to the surface. Personally, I like that myth better. There were also theories about the origins of amber that weren't myths. For example, in ancient China, amber had some kind of association with bees and honey, probably because someone found a hunk of amber with a bee in it and made some pretty good assumptions. To me, that assumption makes a lot more sense than stories of weeping lady trees and Lithuanian Thor ruining a mermaid goddess's life, but somehow both of those myths are closer to the mark than amber being related to honey. Who would have thought? In addition to inspiring myths, amber has also been long credited with having mystical and medicinal properties. It was said that powdered amber could treat any number of illnesses, maybe even act as an antidote to poison. That's all been debunked over time, but as recently as the 20th century, people talked about amber in a similar way that present-day individuals sometimes talk about pink Himalayan salt. You know how you can like buy hunks of Himalayan salt and stick it in your house and it's supposed to do something? Amber had similar connotations, but for like really rich people. One truth about amber that is kind of magical in a sciencey way is that it has weird electrical properties. I'm not sure what the official scientific word for it is, but if you rub it vigorously, which sounds awful, but if you do, it produces a negative electrical charge that will attract paper and dust to it. In fact, the Greeks called amber electron, the very word from which we derive the word electricity. And isn't that just delightful? I thought it was delightful. As for its physical properties, amber can vary in color, though it's most often associated with a kind of yellowy, orangish gold. In actuality, though, amber can basically appear in any color. In some places, amber can even be dark blue or dark green, but that's pretty rare and usually tied to a very specific geographical area. For the most part, Baltic amber is on the scale from milky white to deep brown, though most of the hunks are somewhere in that goldeny, ambery, orangey middle. In addition to these weird electrical properties and its like wild color range, amber is also a unique gemstone in that it's a poor conductor of heat, meaning that it retains rather than transfers warmth. That made amber an especially popular material from which to make jewelry, both because it was pretty, but also because it felt nice on the skin. If it was warm out, it would feel cool. If it was cold inside, it'd warm you up a little bit. Shards of amber could even function as makeshift heating packs. Or should I say gentle warming pads of some kind. Famed pianist Frederick Chopin would palm amber before he was set to play the piano, as it would keep his fingers warm and spry, ready to really jam on those keys. If it feels warm to the touch, that's a good sign. Also, if it floats in salt water, that's also a good sign. So don't be afraid to dunk your amber, people. Despite being a gemstone, amber is quite soft. You can easily gouge it with a knife. That makes it relatively easy to carve, except for the fact that it's also brittle, so creating hyper-detailed amber carvings is really difficult. If you push a little too much with your chisel, you might ruin your design, which would be bad. That said, the most common method for working amber is to carve it, which blew my mind because I had an entirely different idea for how amber was worked, despite the fact that it is a stone. After seeing high-definition images of the reconstructed amber room, which I talked more about in episode 36, I assumed that amber could be heated and turned back into a kind of taffy-ish substance. But that ain't true. It can be heated and quote unquote softened, but to be quite honest, I'm not even totally sure what that means. And I get the sense that a lot of people who write about the amber room also don't know what that means. It's one of those things that you just see repeated over and over and over again, but no one ever explains it. From my research, my best guess is that amber craftsmen heat amber to the point where it can be worked without risking crumbling or breaking. I don't think they turn it into taffy time or anything like that. Today there are types of amber that can be molded. It's called pressing amber. But that's more of a modern thing, not a 1700s thing. In fact, prolonged exposure to heat is not good for amber. It can only be heated to about 200 degrees Celsius or 400-ish degrees Fahrenheit before it'll catch on fire and burn, rendering it unusable. But it will give off a delightful piny, incensey scent. So you've got that as your consolation perfume. In the olden days, some people even burnt amber specifically for that scent. While there are different methods for working amber now, the preferred method of working it back in the day was, as I said, to carve it. In many respects, carving amber was very similar to carving ivory, to the point that a lot of amber and ivory craftspeople worked both materials. There were various different ways of approaching carving amber. The first was to cater whatever you were making to the hunk of amber you had, so you didn't waste any. But our homies up in the Baltic region were not concerned at all with waste, because they had an abundance of amber at their fingertips. The larger the work, the more likely it is that it's made from several pieces of amber. For something like an amber goblet, not to be confused with glass goblets that look like amber, the artisan would have to use a rod to connect pieces of amber for something like the stem. For larger works like chess boards or altars, hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of amber would be joined together with adhesive or some kind of clever carving technique, and then laid over a base material that was not amber. Because, well, baby, a solid amber altar would be hella expensive. The undoubted greatest work masterpiece of all time in amber is of course the Amber Room. I talk all about it for like an hour and a half in episode 36, so you can go over there to hear more about that. But as a general overview, the amber room featured dozens of painstakingly crafted panels made from hundreds of thousands of amber shards, arranged as a mosaic on wood backing, creating an amber veneer that was then decorated with more amber, from frames to molding to low-relief carvings that just piled one on top of another in a kind of incrustation of amber. It's absolutely insane. But amber wasn't just about these like super luxurious products or objects. It also served more practical purposes, like for sunglass lenses. In fact, the amber craftsman who made the amber room did so using a novel technique he learned from a guy who was making sunglasses from amber in Konigberg, a city that was once, essentially, the amber capital of the world. If Koenigsberg doesn't sound familiar, these days we know it as Kalingrad. It's now part of Russia, used to be part of Germany, doesn't matter. What matters is that the best amber workshops in the business were naturally located in the Baltic region where amber was the most plentiful. These capitals of amber included Koningsberg, Danzig, and Dresden, though amber masters could be found in any number of cities in that area. For centuries, amber served as the go-to material for things like diplomatic gifts, particularly given its geographical connotations. Prussian kings and queens, who had kingdoms in that Baltic region, dished amber out like candy, proud of both the natural resources of their kingdom, but also the talents of their craftspeople. Unfortunately, amber craftsmanship really took a nosedive in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the point where it basically died out in places where it had once been a booming business. When a group of archaeologists and art historians in Russia decided to reconstruct the amber room in the 1970s, they spent the first 11 years of the project researching amber craftsmanship. It's that reconstruction process that led to the recovery of that lost art form in the region. Even then, those artists had the benefit of modern tools like electric saws and drills. From many of the videos I watched on the recreation efforts, the tools they use look to me uncannily similar to those you'd encounter at the dentist's office when you go to get a cavity filled. Obviously, the amber craftsmen back in the early 1700s working on, for example, the amber room, didn't have electric tools, which makes their work all the more impressive. From Stone Age burials to modern-day reconstructions of masterpieces, amber is a material that represents the coming together of natural and human history. Touching authentic amber is like touching the material stuff of time, an object created by nature over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, punctuated by a little human intervention. But what man giveth, he also taketh away, as it's human intervention that both gave and robbed the world of the most magnificent amber masterwork of all, the famed Amber Room. As for those works that have survived, I hope they continue to do so, passing his gifts from one generation to another, just as they have for hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions, of years. That is all I have for you on the mystical, magical, million-year-old material that is amber. In the name of keeping this mini sode mini, I'm going to cut things off there. You can find additional information, including pictures, and a comprehensive list of the sources I used to write today's episode on stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. If you enjoyed this mini sode, please consider leaving the podcast a review or sharing it with friends. That would be cool too. And I hope that you visit again soon, perhaps over on episode 36, where the amber madness continues. The usual thanks go out to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the music that you hear at the beginning and the end of the episode. The first song you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto numero 4 by Kevin McLeod, while the second, jauntier tune is called Success Dreams. I hope you'll join me in episode 36, but for now I shall say A la próxima Michi.