This is an open access publication distributed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International License. Stone Age amber bear figurines from the Baltic Sea area By Daniel Groß and Peter Vang Petersen Keywords: Amber, figurative art, stray finds, dating problems, animism, Palaeolithic, Neolithic Abstract: Amber bear figurines are a small group of objects found all around the Baltic Sea. They are usually naturalistically shaped and come in a variety of forms and wealth of detail. A major issue when dealing with this topic is the fact that the figurines are mostly stray finds, so they lack archaeological context. Furthermore, they are not directly datable due to their material. This makes it difficult to contrast them against their archaeo-cultural background. This paper will therefore discuss the dates that have been assigned to these figurines and the reasons why bears were depicted. As it turns out, there are less indications for a Mesolithic date than for an earlier or later phase, based on comparable art and styles. This also aligns well with other naturalistic amber finds from the Palaeolithic and Neo- lithic, and hence questions the traditional attribution of the amber bear figurines to the Mesolithic. The function of these artefacts, however, remains unclear due to the lack of contextual information. Introduction Ever since humans resettled the areas around the modern Baltic Sea in the Late Glacial, bears have been an element of their natural environment. Having already been represented in cave paintings during the Upper Palaeolithic in French caves, such as Grotte Chauvet, and by the headless clay sculpture in the Grotte de Montespan (France), in later times representations of bears, made of amber (and other materials), apparently “became mobile”. The phenomenon of amber bear figurines is so far little understood, as they are not regular finds and are very limited in numbers. However, they are not a single and unprecedented phenomenon. Ceramic bear figurines were already manufactured at the Upper Palaeolithic site of Dolní Věstonice ( c. 29,000–25,000 cal BP; V andiver et al. 1989). The bear figurines in the focus of this contribution are exclusively manufactured of amber and thus made of collected raw material. Amber in Europe is mainly distributed in the coastal regions of the southern Baltic where it is often found on the shore, since it has been redeposited from Eocene glauconitic sediments by fluvial and glacial processes. As amber is a material that, similar to other organic substances, deteriorates rather quickly when exposed, only low numbers of such finds are known from the Stone Age around the Baltic Sea – even when compared with finds made of other organic materials (e.g. bone, antler, and wood). Figura- tively bear-shaped amber objects are even scarcer, so only 15 specimens are known – including one modern fake and five ambiguous finds –, six from the territories of modern Denmark, four from Latvia, two from Poland, and one from Norway, Estonia, and Finland, respectively (Fig. 1). The discussed find group is extremely small and thus not very well suited for comparative analysis or general conclusions, but traditionally the figurines are attributed to the Mesolithic ( c. 11,600–6500 Bear and Human: Facets of a Multi-Layered Relationship from Past to Recent Times, with Emphasis on Northern Europe, ed. by Oliver Grimm (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), pp. 943–960 FHG 10.1484.M.TANE-EB.5.134373