Baltic amber or Burmese amber: FTIR studies on amber artifacts of Eastern Han Dynasty unearthed from Nanyang

There is no case of scientific and technological analysis on archaeological amber of Han Dynasty in China. To estimate the provenance micro-destructively, we have utilized GC/MS (Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectromete) and FTIR (Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy) analysis on the amber artifacts which were excavated from the stone-carved tomb M18 around the 1st century in Nanyang City, Henan Province. GC/MS result suggests that the amber with amount lower than 150 μg is inadequate to detect significant markers. The FTIR spectra have high similarity to Burmese amber without the Baltic shoulder and the absorption peak near 887 cm^-1. From this, it appears that the raw materials of these ambers were from Burma and that Burmese amber was transported to the Central China through Yunnan by free circulation in Han Dynasty.