Millions of years ago, now-extinct forests or mangrove swamps produced resin deposits that became what we now know as one of nature’s most lovely gems: amber.

The history of amber

The forces that caused these sticky resinous deposits to harden and fossilize remain a mystery. While viscous, the sap attracted bubbles of water and air, plants, insects – even tiny vertebrates.

Eventually, the chunks of resin with all their trappings began falling to earth, and with time they were buried. Across the millennia, the original resin developed amber’s characteristic hardness, density and melting point. This plant-based gem has long survived the trees from which it sprang, and the ecosystems of which it once formed a part. (Poinar, 1994)

In some regions, layers of rock containing fossilized resin settled at the bottom of the sea, where ocean currents released them from their watery graves and during storms tossed them onto the beaches.

In Chiapas for example, and other parts of the planet, geological movements pushed at the amber-containing rock until it formed mountains: then, as the first glowing amber was revealed by erosion, miners began digging tunnels to locate veins of amber that might lead to the “mother lode”.

Chiapas amber comes from the leguminous Hymenaea courbaril tree that lived toward the end of the Oligocene and beginning of the Miocene epochs – in other words, some 22 and a half to 26 million years ago. Some of the flora and fauna fossils found in Chiapas amber can be traced to the inhabitants of shallow tropical shorelines; salt water tidepools or mangroves. Over millions of years, dramatic geological changes turned those long-ago seacoasts into what are now mountains.

Amber is mined in the Altos region of Chiapas state, near the towns of Simojovel and Totolapa. The earliest evidence of what may be seen as mining and selling amber in Chiapas dates from the Middle Preclassic era (4000-1000 BC) in the area around Totolapa, from whence the amber was exported to the region of the Olmecs. (Lee, Thomas)

During the XV century, amber was part of the tribute or “taxes” the eight towns of Soconusco were forced to pay to the Mexicas (sometimes called Aztecs) in the valley of Mexico.

The Tzeltal culture’s lexicon has three different words for amber: pauch, for amber stones; pauchil, for amber used in nose rings; and hubti, for amber used in lip rings. Amber is a timeless material, highly charged with cultural identity.