Amber for Artemis. Preliminary report on the amber finds from the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus, Alessandro Naso
Review
Alessandro Naso
Amber for Artemis
Preliminary Report on the Amber Finds from the Sanctuaryof Artemis at Ephesos
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Amber from prehistory to Iron Age
Amber is the fossilized resin of extinct coniferous trees, millions of years old. In antiquity it washighly appreciated for its colour, transparency, natural organic beauty and electrostatic proper-ties
The oldest artefacts, dating back to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, have been found nearthe main natural deposits of amber along the coasts of the Baltic Sea
Ornaments of Baltic amberdating to the Neolithic and the Copper Age
3rd millennia B.C.) are distributed throughoutcontinental Europe from Northern Germany to Southern Italy, where also Sicilian amber has been used from the Neolithic onwards. In the Middle Bronze Age (2
nd
millennium B.C.) amberhas been used in the Terramare culture in Northern Italy: here amber working can be inferredat Spilamberto (province Modena)
3
. Studying the geographical distribution of amber during theBronze Age permitted José Maria de Navarro, in 1925, to postulate the existence of some traderoutes between Northern Europe and Italy, terminating at the Adriatic Sea
4
. This hypothesis wasgenerally accepted and the ›amber route‹ became a well-established
concept among archaeolo-gists. More recently, several scholars have expressed doubt about the existence of the so-calledamber route in the Bronze and Iron Ages: Thomas Stöllner has argued that at least in the IronAge many perishable goods such as salt, pelts and so on were also traded from Central Europeto the Mediterranean sea along these routes, and Aleksandar Palavestra titled a 2007 paper »Was
there an amber route?«
5
.