Large deposits of Neolithic artifacts made of amber (beads, buttons, pendants, rings, and plaquette figurines) have been found at the Juodkrante and Palanga sites in Lithuania, both dated between 2500 and 1800 BC, and both of which are near Baltic amber mines. Catherine the Great moved it to her summer palace in Tsarskoye Selo and embellished it about 1770.

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For thousands of years, amber that has been pulled up from the ocean floor by strong tides and fierce storms has been deposited along this shorline. Needless to say, these conditions were not very conducive to the development of amber crafts. Celtic tribes spread over vast geographic regions throughout Europe reaching Italy and the Balkans on the Adriatic coast. After the great baptism of Gdansk by St. Adalbert the assortment of amber crafts was broadened to include amber crosses. One depositional environment for amber is marginal marine. Therefore, given copious resin producing trees and appropriate burial conditions, amber is preserved in sedimentary clay, shale, and sandstones associated with layers of lignite, a woody brown coal. 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. It was here that the newly transported resin, in some cases still plastic and soft began its long metamorphosis into amber jewelry. The source of most of this amber jewellery has for many years presumed to be the extinct species of tree Pinites Succinifer. An important and relevant observation is that the ecological systems which are supported by the Pseudolarix trees in China appear to reflect those presumed and extrapolated from the inclusions discovered in Baltic amber. Shoved around northern Europe by glaciers and river channels, lumps of genuine Baltic amber jewellery 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.

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