Amber has long been recognized as an important indicator of Mycenaean foreign contacts. Though much has been written, no thorough survey of the topic has yet been undertaken. The chief purpose of this article is to present a corpus, as complete as the authors can make it, of the known Mycenaean amber finds, together with those from adjacent areas.
Since the nineteenth century amber objects in Italy and Greece have generally been considered by scholarly opinion to have been imported from the Baltic, and a number of finds, including Schliemann's from the Shaft Graves, were subjected to rudimentary chemical analyses to ‘prove’ this, the criterion being the presence of succinic acid. Navarro in 1925 traced the route the amber was supposed to have taken by charting the distribution of finds in central Europe in the Bronze and Iron Ages.