Boys Slave in Mexican Cliffside Caves for Precious Bits of Amber : Treasures: Miners as young as 6 risk cave-ins and robbery to earn perhaps $1,000 a year. The stones are especially valuable if a prehistoric insect is trapped inside.

About 35 million years ago an insect was overcome by a drop of pine pitch that oozed from a tree trunk, trapping the hapless critter in time like . . . well . . . a bug in amber.

The bug is still trapped there, a minuscule leg extended, an oversized jaw opened wide.

Miners, some as young as 6 or 7, dig the fossilized pitch from cliffside tunnels above this town in southern Mexico.

The ancient Greeks and Egyptians had amber. The ancient Mayas of southern Mexico considered it magic and called amber the “stone of the sun.”

And while most of the world’s supply is mined today in the Baltic region of Europe, jewelers are increasingly looking to the rugged mines of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, for high-quality amber.

The work has gone on amid an uprising by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, guerrillas who took to arms in January, 1994, with the sympathy of this and other towns surrounded by steep hills of banana and coffee plots.

Digging for amber is dirty, dangerous work for the Mexican miners who toil by candlelight in dark tunnels, burrowing into these cliffsides.

“I used to go to school but I quit a year ago to work here,” said Marcelino Gutierrez Gonzalez, 13, hammering on a chisel in a cramped cave 80 feet inside a mountain.

“It’s better to work here and earn what you can. You can’t earn anything in school. Well, you can, but they say it takes years of studying.”

As he pried away pieces of soft, shalelike rock, he studied the newly exposed surfaces with the light of a candle as his only illumination. With the care of a dentist he probed the rock with a chisel tip.

Nothing.

“We pay 100 pesos [about $18] a month to the mine owner and we keep what we find,” he said. “Sometimes there is amber, sometimes the amber goes away. But the smoke from the candles messes me up. It gives me headaches.”

A small pile of amber the size of walnuts, his day’s take, lay beside him giving off a brownish-gold glow in the dimly flickering light.

Buyers come from all over the world to Simojovel to buy amber at about $100 a pound for smaller pieces, much more for larger ones. A piece with a well-preserved insect can bring a small fortune for miners, who are lucky to earn $1,000 a year.

For Gutierrez, there is a chance robbers will waylay him on the long, isolated walk home; they may harm him as well as steal from him. He also risks being caught in a cave-in in the hand-dug tunnels, which have no supports or safety features.

A narrow path along the face of a steep hillside, almost a cliff, connects the tunnels. The only sounds are the chirping of jungle birds below and the clinking of hammers on chisels within.

It is work few will perform.

“In Europe the children can’t work in the amber mines. It’s too dangerous,” said Philippe Chatillon, an amber merchant in San Cristobal de las Casas, a three-hour drive away where much of the amber from the Simojovel mines is sold as finished jewelry. “But here, well . . . .”

Each day, Indian miners make a grueling hike across steep hills and valleys to this series of mines, called Los Pozitos, where they shed their shirts and shoes and vanish into the tunnels.

Some have been doing it for years.

“I started hanging out around the mines when I was 6, like these kids here,” said Guillermo Carerra, 21, pointing to a half-dozen boys at a tunnel entrance. “Within a year I was working.”

Carerra is an unpaid laborer who takes wheelbarrows of scrap rock from the tunnels and tips them over the cliff at the tunnel mouth. He keeps any amber he finds.

In a nearby tunnel, Antonio Velasco, a 30-year veteran of the mines, says he had found only one small piece in three weeks.

“It’s a lot of work for very little,” he said as he hammered his chisel into the rock and pried away. “There is no amber, no amber.”

Cave-ins, he said, are a problem during the rainy season. “We still work then. We’re just more careful.”

Some tunnels are barely high enough to sit up in, and candles drive the temperature to the sweltering point. These darkened shafts are no place for the claustrophobic.

When the candles flicker out, the miners know oxygen levels are too low to work. On a recent visit, low levels of oxygen were blamed for everything from sickness to a watch that had stopped.

Amber, which weighs very little, is polished and turned into necklaces, earrings and other jewelry or statues, then sold and resold for many times its original price.

Amber graces the wrists and necks of wealthy tourists who flock to San Cristobal de las Casas, known mostly for its nearby indigenous villages and colonial architecture.

Indigenous women still consider it a lucky charm and put amber bracelets on infants to ward off “the evil eye.”

Much amber contains dirt or leaf fragments, but amber with insects is rare and sends the price soaring.

Scientists who have studied air bubbles trapped in amber say the air then contained 40% oxygen. The average today is about 22%.

“Some insects are worth more than others and scientists value some of them very highly,” said Carlos de Villar, a Simojovel amber jeweler who collects insects in amber.

“Some are extinct. Some are still around but in different form.”

The insects’ DNA remains intact.

“If you buy amber in San Cristobal you can be sure it has been checked out by microscope for any insects,” De Villar said. “If you buy it in the plaza here with the dirt still on it, well, maybe . . . .”

“If you buy it with the dirt you lose a little bit because of what the dirt weighs, but you can come out ahead in other ways.”

De Villar and others caution against visiting the mines themselves, especially the remote ones.

“Six or seven months ago some Italians went to the mines to buy and they were robbed of $2,000 by men in ski masks,” he said. Miners are sometimes killed for their amber.

Few around Simojovel are talkative about amber. Most miners are hard-muscled men--and boys--of few words who rarely see visitors. They are fiercely independent.

“Are you finding amber?”

“Sometimes, sometimes not.”

Or:

“How far is it out to the road?”

“Well, from here to there.”

“In the Baltics they mine maybe 500 tons a year,” said Chatillon, whose Arbol de la Vida amber shops in San Cristobal de las Casas probably handle as much amber as anyone in Mexico.

“Here we produce maybe 1,200 pounds. Who knows?”

Most amber is thumbnail-sized or smaller and winds up as necklaces, bracelets or pendants. Rare larger pieces of a pound or more are converted by skilled carvers into statues and figurines that can bring thousands of dollars.

Prices vary.

Simple bracelets or pendants go for a few dollars. “But a piece with a scorpion in it, with his tail, could cost $2,000 or more.” Chatillon said.

Then there is the danger of bogus amber.

Baubles of plastic and glass abound in San Cristobal, usually sold by street vendors, said Chatillon, warning, “Most people don’t know true amber from false.”

“The first thing is the price. The items they sell for 10 pesos [less than $2] would cost $100 or more if they were real.”

“The second thing is that amber burns at 400 degrees,” he said, lighting a lighter under a small piece of raw amber.

A rich, heady aroma of incense swirled toward the ceiling.

“That is the smell of amber,” he said. “Plastic gives off a terrible odor and glass of course doesn’t burn at all.”

Amber prices are affected by color (the darker hues are more prized) and by where nature placed what the amber encases.

Chatillon held up a marble-sized piece containing a perfect ant in one corner. “Now this would be worth much more if the ant were in the middle,” he said.

Chatillon has a basketball-sized chunk that weighs 17 pounds, possibly the largest ever taken from a Simojovel mine. He doesn’t know yet what he will do with it.

“It has been around for 40 million years,” he said, hefting it lovingly with both hands. “It can wait a few more months.”