University of Bristol Lead Applicant: Dr Mark Jackson in the School of Geographical Sciences
International Collaborators: Dr Alessandro Rippa (University of Oslo, Norway) Dr Laur Kiik (University of Oslo, Norway)
Fossils can be exceptionally preserved under a number of different circumstances, but nothing really compares to how fossils preserve in amber. One the richest, and among the oldest, windows into the Cretaceous (145-66 million years ago) comes from amber mined in the contested Kachin border regions of Burma (Myanmar) and China. Although prized for their palaeobiological importance in opening a unique evolutionary window to the deep past, Burmese amber is also deeply contested as a scientific archive. It is sometimes termed ‘blood amber’ because it is a commodity predominantly gathered and produced for the global gem trade by small scale informal and often displaced miners. This Kachin gem trade, of which fossil amber is a small part, is enmeshed within a political economy fuelling a long-running civil war. Kachin amber is thus argued to be part of a wider weapons economy, inter-ethnic conflict, and resource war that includes many sorts of gems, illegal forestry, illegal metals mining, and wide-spread environmental and human harm.
This RDICA supported symposium brings together palaeobiologists, human geographers, and social anthropologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Oslo with expertise in Kachin amber, the conflict in Kachin and Myanmar, border infrastructures, and contested commodities to explore the political ecology and science ethics debates surrounding its use. Over two days of research seminars and workshop discussions, they will together examine what amber and its global circulations can tell us about the present and future of our planetary economies, the specific conflict ecologies present in Kachin province and the wider region today, as well as the implications of such conflicts for amber’s use in scientific research. Talks and discussions will draw on palaeobiology, ethnographic research from a Kachin and Burma Studies perspective, and the border and conflict infrastructures sustaining the wider amber trade.
As part of this collaboration there is a Research Symposium taking place on 6 and 7 March 2025.
