Amber in Prehistoric Iberia (Murrillo-Barroso et al, 2018)

Almost all the amber in Late Neolithic and Copper Age Southern Iberia is of Sicilian origin.  Simitite is a dark red color and found around the mouth of the Simeto River on the Eastern shore of Sicily.

This new paper by Murrillo-Barroso et al (2018) looks at the sources of Iberian amber through the ages.

It is proposed that Sicilian amber made its way to Iberia via North Africa, perhaps through Tunisia, rather than direct trade during the Copper Age.  Then strangely, this rich amber trade in Iberia is completely disrupted in the 2nd millennium along with most of Southern Europe when Baltic amber is most common.  The authors are not sure to what degree the Bell Beaker phenomenon is responsible for this.  Even then, Baltic amber appears somewhat restricted to the Northeast of the Peninsula in the Bronze Age, at least for the moment.

Also, the disruption in the southern amber trade is indicative of a larger disruption in the Mediterranean economic network involving other commodities and styling.  What kind of disruption?  Plague? Pillaging? Piracy?

Amber decoration and over 1Million shell buttons on thirty women in a prince's grave!

One interesting question I would ask is to what extent Bell Beakers eventually settled or traded in Eastern Sicily around the outflow of the Simeto.  Not much or nothing that I see.  So it would seem that the Beakers were either unable to wrest control of this resource from the natives in Eastern Sicily, and/or perhaps the Sicilian cartel was a competitor of an increasingly powerful Central European network?

Maybe Baltic amber was cheaper, more abundant, stronger networks.  But looking at other materials it seems more than just economics or social re-alignment.  Disruption seems like the right word.



Murillo-Barroso M, Peñalver E, Bueno P, Barroso R, de Balbõ Ân R, Martino Ân-Torres M (2018)
Amber in prehistoric Iberia: New data and a review. PLoS ONE 13(8): e0202235. https://doi.org/
10.1371/journal.pone.0202235  PLOS ONE

 Abstract

 Provenancing exotic raw materials and reconstructing the nature and routes of exchange is a major concern of prehistoric archaeology. Amber has long been recognised as a key commodity of prehistoric exchange networks in Europe. However, most science-based studies so far have been localised and based on few samples, hence making it difficult to observe broad geographic and chronological trends. This paper concentrates on the nature, distribution and circulation of amber in prehistoric Iberia. We present new standardised FTIR analyses of 22 archaeological and geological samples from a large number of contexts across Iberia, as well as a wide scale review of all the legacy data available. On the basis of a considerable body of data, we can confirm the use of local amber resources in the Northern area of the Iberian Peninsula from the Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age; we push back the arrival of Sicilian amber to at least the 4th Millennium BC, and we trace the appearance of Baltic amber since the last quarter of the 2nd Millennium BC, progressively replacing Sicilian simetite. Integrating these data with other bodies of archaeological information, we suggest that the arrival of Baltic amber was part of broader Mediterranean exchange networks, and not necessarily the result of direct trade with the North. From a methodological perspective, thanks to the analyses carried out on both the vitreous core and the weathered surfaces of objects made of Sicilian simetite, we define the characteristic FTIR bands that allow the identification of Sicilian amber even in highly deteriorated archaeological samples.