Raw material preferences within ornament production in the Late Neolithic amber workshops of Żuławy Wiślane in Northern Poland

Abstract In the 3 rd millennium BC, amber ornaments became widespread across Central Europe. In the basin of the Vistula and Oder rivers, such artefacts are known from five Late Neolithic archaeological cultural units (the Globular Amphora Culture, the Złota Culture, the Rzucewo Culture, the Corded Ware Culture and Bell Beaker Culture). Amber objects have been recovered, on the one hand, from both the graves of the aforementioned archaeological cultural units and, to a much lesser extent, as contextless chance finds. In both cases, they are found as finished ornaments. On the other hand, they also have been recovered from amber workshops on the south-eastern Baltic coast, mainly from Żuławy Wiślane, as items abandoned at various stages of processing as well as waste from their manufacture. The amber ornaments found in graves and as chance finds are heavily weathered, and thus not suitable for determining the characteristics of the raw material from which they were made. Only artefacts from amber-processing workshops in Żuławy Wiślane are in an excellent enough condition, due to the environment in which they were found, to allow full raw material identification, and thus enable an examination of the raw material preferences of their Late Neolithic makers. This paper reports the results of the raw material analysis conducted on samples from amber workshops discovered near the village of Niedźwiedziówka located in the region of Żuławy Wiślane. The research has revealed that an amber raw material with a uniform structure, in shades of yellow, opaque and mixed with a small proportion of transparent variety was preferred.