Mid-Atlantic Gardening: Greettings from Latvia!!!, 1 by Gitagal

Gitagal wrote:
Here's the goods (amber) of one of the many street vendors that line these plazas. Mind you, there were nearly 100,000 extra tourists that flooded Riga during these 3 weeks because of the "Song and Dance Festival" that was going on. So--everyone was out there--trying to sell whatever they could. I bought 3 of those little, amber-covered Hedgehogs (4-7 Lats each) as souvenirs for myself and my 2 daughters.
I have enough amber jewelery and don't need any more.

Just FYI----Amber was never popular in the US until the film "Jurrasic Park" came out. Then it--like--took off. Most good amber comes from the Baltics, as it is the oldest....like, 30 million years old! Lithuania and Poland are huge suppliers of amber.
Amber is petrified sap from large, prehistoric Pines. As the trees lived and died, they fell over and, eventually, became covered with soil and sediment. Then the seas came and flooded all these areas. The trees rotted and disintegrated, leaving all the sap in them as petrifies, soft "stones". This is Amber. It comes in all colors and shades and clear or mottled. There is blue, green, milky white, honey clear, etc. Once in a while an insect would get caught in the sap and become embedded in it. These pieces of Amber fetch great amounts of money.
Amber pieces still wash out now and then on the pure white beaches of these countries.
Commercially, Amber is excavated. One of the biggest places this is done in this Hemisphere is in the Dominican Republic, but this amber is NOT as old as the one from the Baltics.

When I was in Australia/New Zealand in 1988, to my utter surprise, there, in the Museum of Natural History, were floor-to-ceiling cases with Amber of all kinds--some chunks were the size of loaves of bread! HOWEVER--This was relatively immature Amber--being only 10-20 thousand years old. This kind of Amber is sometimes referred to as "Copal".
I am sure you can Google Amber and learn much more about it.

There is a wonderful book on this Gem called: "Amber--The golden Gem of the Ages" by Patty C. Rice, PhD. Published in 1987. ISBN #0-917-00720-5