Schwarzort serrated amber blades

Source term: Hängestücke (hanging pieces); Lang 1904: bullroarers in amber

Hängestück (German): a hanging piece, Klebs’s term for a flat amber ornament pierced at one end.

From 1860 steam dredgers ground along the bed of the Curonian Lagoon at Schwarzort, now Juodkrantė, lifting sand from six to eleven metres down in search of amber. Workmen picking through the haul on deck began to find pieces that people had shaped thousands of years before: buttons, beads, little human figures, and flat pendants pierced at one end. In 1904 Andrew Lang looked at Richard Klebs's natural-size drawings and saw bullroarers among them. One long blade has notches cut along both edges, like the serrated Australian boards Lang knew. Most of the hoard burned or vanished in Königsberg in 1945.

Eine grosse Rolle unter den Schwarzorter Bernsteinen spielen die Hängestücke, welche an einem Ende einfach, selten mehrfach senkrecht zur Platte durchbohrt sind

A large part among the Schwarzort ambers is played by the hanging pieces, which are pierced at one end, usually once and rarely several times, through the plate

Richard Klebs, Der Bernsteinschmuck der Steinzeit (1882), p. 19

Particulars

Object

Flat amber plates worked by Stone Age hands and pierced once near one end. The clearest is a parallel-sided blade about 10 × 3 cm, with notches running down both long edges and a large drilled hole at the top. Others in the series include a broad notched trapezoid about 12 × 7 cm, and a shield-shaped plate about 10 × 6 cm with a single hole and two deep notches at the top. That plate has a pinnate pattern incised on its face.

Function

Not recorded.