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Conferences & Networking

The SAS regularly sponsors conferences, workshops, and conference sessions. If you are planning an event relevant to the goals of the society, please get in touch with the VP of Intersociety Relations so that we can explore a partnership.  If you're a student SAS member interested in promoting professional fellowship among your peers, check out the Student Ambassador program and reach out to our VP for Membership Development to learn more.

SAS Executive Board Reading Recommendations – “Amber workshops in Central Europe during the Early Iron Age”

This month’s Reading Recommendation comes from VP for Member Communications Braden Cordivari, who has chosen a newly published paper in Journal of Archaeological Science on the trade in amber by Zuzana Golec Mírová and colleagues, “Amber workshops in Central Europe during the Early Iron Age. Technology, chemical analyses, and Amber Roads.”

The Amber Roads leading from the Baltic to the Mediterranean have long fascinated archaeologists, yet many aspects of the trade remain unclear. This paper is an interesting and thorough synthesis of the latest excavation and chemical data underpinning the discourse. This paper discusses workshop evidence from 41 different sites, showing how amber was worked into beads. Well-preserved and well-excavated workshop sites allow for a step-by-step reconstruction of the chipping, grinding, and drilling that went into turning raw amber into finished objects. The study also combines Raman and infrared spectroscopy as a means for differentiating between eastern and western Baltic sources of amber, allowing for a more detailed look at sourcing and trade. The authors then integrate this chemical data with quantitative modeling of sites and landscape features to show how amber moved across the continent.  

Golec Mírová, Z., Golec, M., Kučera, L., Chytráček, M., Hagemann, K., Mischka, D., Dienstpier, M., Martínek, J., Zemek, V., Přichystal, M., Čižmářová, H., Čižmář, I., Popelka, M., Lečbych, M., Fojtík, P., Parma, D., Sovová, K., Zeman, J., Tomešová, B., Dufek, J., Novák, R., Valentová, J., Hiltscher, T., Krausse, D., Hansen, L., Hoppe, T., Wendling, H., Koch-Waldner, T., Trebsche, P., Praprotnik, T., Potrebica, H., Perkić, D., Dizdar, M., Dmitrović, K., 2026. Amber workshops in Central Europe during the Early Iron Age. Technology, chemical analyses, and Amber Roads. Journal of Archaeological Science 191, 106569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2026.106569

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Golec Mírová et al. 2026, Fig. 11. Supplementing the input data for amber roads with strategic chemical analyses that distinguish the origin of amber from Early Iron Age Europe (800‒370 BC; numbers according to Fig. 1) into “Eastern Amber Road” (eastern Baltic Sea) displayed red ‒ Gdańsk, Lithuania and Kaliningrad source; “Western Amber Road” (North Sea and western Baltic Sea) displayed blue ‒ Denmark and northern Germany source (after Supplement 5).