To kick-off the project’s research agenda and engage with state-of-the-art scholarship, we organised a large workshop at the University of Oslo in the summer of 2024, which was joined by many of the key scholars who have worked at the intersection of social and geological in the social sciences and humanities. This allowed the research team to expand its network and put the project itself on the map – while gaining a better sense of where scholarship in this field is heading.
Building on the insights of the workshop, as well as on regular meetings, reading groups, and other research activities, all members of the team have designed their own ethnographic fieldwork around some of the key themes that the overall project engages with. In the process, we have also reached out to many scholars and practitioners in the world of amber, to get a better sense of ongoing conversations and possible fieldsites.
Amber, we soon realised, is a sticky thing — and not only because prehistoric organisms had a tendency of remaining trapped in it. Amber is sticky in the additional sense that it gathers motley crowds, individuals and communities with diverging interests and positions — and more often then not, it makes them stick together. Researchers on the AMBER projects actively follow such stories and characters: artisans, collectors, scientists, miners and foragers, who find themselves entangled to one another in unexpected ways. Amber, through such journeys and its multiple materialities, opened up contact zones that lie at the convergence of the human and the lithic, the social and the geological, men and earth — and it is those contact zones that we currently seek to explore.
We do so through, predominantly, ethnographically grounded research across different sites of amber extraction, trade, and science, notably including: the China-Burma borderlands, China's Fushun, Mexico’s Chiapas, Germany's Bitterfeld, the Polish coast, western Ukraine, Sicily, and the Dominican Republic.
Additionally, in some of those fieldsites we have gathered in particular “field meetings,” that is, moments of shared fieldwork across some of the members of the AMBER team. These included a poster presentation at a major Palaeontological conference, a week-long research trip to Sicily alongside two palaeontologists, and phases of research in some of China’s main amber sites.
In Sicily and China we have also organised two public events, in collaboration with local actors, to disserminate some of the project’s early findings and consolidate our research network. In the process, team members actively present their work at various scholarly venues: conferences, workshop, department seminar presentations, academic podcasts, and so on.
