Between 14 and 29 March, the AMBER team gathered and travelled across Poland and Lithuania for two weeks of meetings, discussion, and collaborative research. Besides formal members of the team, we were also joined by collaborators from our various field sites: Fushun, Chiapas, Kachin, and the world of amber at large.
We spent the first few days in Warsaw, where we visited the amber collection at the Museum of the Earth and began exploring amber shops and workshops in the Polish capital. We also took a short trip to the Lublin region, a couple of hours south-east of Warsaw, where in recent years several open-pit amber mines have opened. We had the opportunity to visit one such place: the Stellarium Mine, guided by its chief engineer, Mr Henryk Ciosmak. The first pit, we learned, produced over 40 tonnes of amber in a little over two years of excavation, and the opening of three more pits is currently under way.
The second leg of the trip brought us to the port city of Klaipėda, in Lithuania. There we alternated between group discussions (about individual sub-projects and future project outputs) and visits to relevant sites. The latter included the Mizgiris Amber Museum (in Nida), the Palanga Amber Museum, and a guided amber “fishing” session on the coast at Karklė.
For the last few days we returned to Poland, this time to Gdańsk – the coastal city that is often referred to as the "amber capital of the world”. In Gdańsk we strolled past the amber shops of Mariacka Street and the Old Town, spent an evening foraging for amber with UV lights in the city’s hinterland, and attended AMBERIF: the biggest amber fair in the world. At AMBERIF, we also presented our research at the XXVIII Seminar on Amber,organised by Prof Ewa Wagner-Wysiecka.
The trip offered us much food for thought: new questions and perspectives that we will bring back to our ethnographic analyses and to our main fieldsites. It also consolidated common threads of interest, and helped us planning some of the project's outputs. More will result from this trip -- stay tuned!