Academic Scientific JournalsSome Thoughts on the Human Valuing of Amber, Past and Present
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/porta.2024.23.12Keywords:
Amber, Human Flourishing, Africa, enslaved people, burialAbstract
This paper summarizes two areas of recent scholarship by the author concerning human appreciation and its various uses of amber from the Neolithic to the present and how they were intertwined in the research. As part of the University of Pennsylvania Human Flourishing project, amber was considered in light of its sourcing, artisanal approaches, manufacture, usages, and manners of sharing including bodily display and both private and public exhibition. For the subject of Amber, Africa and the African Diaspora, the focus was on two recent archaeological finds from an historic cemetery in New York (wherein were buried both freed and enslaved persons) and from the closed Rio di Janeiro Valongo Wharf site associated with the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. The analysis included the millennia-long trade to and usage in Africa as well as in the African diaspora.
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