Unfortunately chemical tests for succinic acid are expensive and damage or destroy samples. Baltic amber is not necessarily preferable to any other kind of amber–in fact, Beck comments that it is visually indistinguishable from the local varieties found elsewhere.
Amber is a fossilized resin from coniferous (pine) trees that has been collected by people living along the shores of the Baltic Sea since the Bronze Age. Needless to say, these conditions were not very conducive to the development of amber crafts.
Amber working became a means of living for the majority of the inhabitants of the region. Between 480 B. C. and 39 AD , Europe was dominated by the Celts. Celtic merchants revived the old amber routes and forged new ones linking Italy and Iliria to the “Amber Coast” of the Southern Baltic Sea. All routes led south towards the Black Sea, reaching Rome via the Roman Aquilea tract and Greece via the Hellenic Alexandropolis route. The art works produced at this juncture included sacred religious sculptures as well as practical objects such as boxes, candle holders, caskets, clocks, picture frames, and tableware.
Trees and resin may be transported and deposited in quiet water sediments that formed the bottom of a lagoon or delta at the margin of a sea. Wood and resin are buried under the sediment and while the resin becomes amber, the wood becomes lignite.
The geological reason for the concentration of amber rings in this region has been described by a number of authorities N.O. Holst, the Swedish State Geologist referred to an ancient river called the ‘Alnarps’ which he wanted to call the ‘Amber River’.
The river followed a fault in the geological strata taking a roughly Southeast route starting near the city of Ystad and it has been tracked as far as Northern Själland. The Delta spilled out into an ancient sea basin called the ‘Tethys’. This conviction has been recently confirmed by Albert Bogdasarov, a Byelorussian mineralogist who recommends the wearing of amber necklaces, especially by children, in areas of intense radiation caused by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.But, two recent pine tree genera’s have been found which do possess succinic acid in their resin, they are Keteleeria and Pseudolarix. The latter has been discovered in the Eastern mountain ranges of China.
Shoved around northern Europe by glaciers and river channels, lumps of genuine Baltic amber silver can still be found today on the eastern coasts of England and Holland, throughout Poland, Scandinavia and northern Germany and much of western Russia and the Baltic states.