Traipsing through the Amazon Jungle can be very interesting at times. In September 02 we stopped for water at a small stick hut. People build these huts with local materials from the jungle, living off the land. They plant small gardens and raise small livestock herds. They also traipse through the jungle searching for anything profitable. Knowing that we were in the area and only interested in rocks, they had mostly local quartz to show us, along with some small stones of topaz rough. But what caught our interest was a sack of what they called "brille", having no idea what it was. After admiring fine Baltic and Dominican Amber for many years at the Tucson shows, I knew it was amber/copal. We decided to delay our walk to our nearby Amazon Opal mine, and visited the spot where they were getting their amber. We bought everything they had, and came back a week later to see if they had gotten out any more. To our dismay, they had very little when we returned, saying that they think they got it all out. Well, we happily bought the rest of what they had, along with their quartz and topaz rough. We began polishing these pieces seen here in October 02, and we are very happy with the results. We hope to meet someone soon who is knowledgeable, to assist us in naming our included insects.

We brought our initial collection of the New Amazon Amber/Copal to the USA for the first time, for the Desert Gardens Gem & Mineral Show in Quartzite AZ, from Jan 1 through February 15th 2003. To our surprise, it was our best seller this year. The response was incredible. While in Arizona, we teamed up with Melissa Smith who is wire-wrapping many of our finer pieces. Her first wraps are now available below.

The photo below shows the people behind the story of Amazon Amber/Copal: who found and carried the rough amber out of the jungle (Me: Tomas Bond, the bald guy), who had the goods worked into beautiful gemstones in Teofilo Otoni, Minas Gerais (my partner Jeffrey Gale, the long-hair guy), and who worked many stones into fine wire wrapped jewelry pieces (Melissa Smith, the pretty girl who is also a geology student)

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We hope you enjoy our limited production of Amazon Amber/Copal in single gemstones (with or without insects) or wire-wrapped jewelry, brought to you by jungle-gems.com, direct from the Amazon Jungle.

* Special Note: We are still trying to get our new find dated. By GIA standards it must be at least 1 million years old for us to call it "Amber". If it is younger, the word "Copal" is used to identify petrified tree resin. Until we resolve this issue definitively, we will call our product "Amazon Amber/Copal".