Before leaving the amber routes, it is worthwhile mentioning that during the last years, quite some effort (some serous, some rather amateurish) has gone into identifying amber-related toponyms along documented or hypothesized amber roads.
The Germanic name for amber is "Bernstein" - the burnable stone, and it has been suggested that many places with "Brenn-", "Bern-" or related forms in their name point to a role in amber trade. Among the plausible suggestions that are accepted among many archaeologists is the eastern transalpine route from
Verona (German"Bern") via the
Brenner, to Innsbruck, and further onwards via the "
Fernpass" to Augsburg and the upper Danube. For towns along the Western Alpine passes, such as
Berne or
Brienz in Switzeland, the connection isn't implausible either, though I start to get sceptical when people interpret St. Bernhard (the mountain pass) as an amber name.
Before going into further detail, note that around the Mediterranean, amber was in antiquity known as
electrum. Its electrostatic properties later lead to transfer the name onto a physical phenomenon that today is known as "electricity". As such, I think it is rather futile to try to find amber names along the Mediterranean coast, though fire (old greek: pyr), burning etc. relate to a common IE root, so there is a slight chance that the "burnable stone" has also brought forward related toponyms there.
It is actually unclear to me which word the Continental Celts, masters of the iron age amber trade, used. English Wikipedia suggests that "amber" is actually a borrowing from Arab - they used "ambar" to denote a waxy whale excrement used in perfumery (ambergris), and since both ambergris and amber are waxy substances collected on the shore, the name was transferred from the one to the other sometimes during the middle ages. This sounds possible. However, as "ber" relates to a common IE root, and the Germanics, from which the Celts collected the stones, called it with that root already, Continental Celts may also have maintained that root as "amber". So, as you see, there is still a lot of speculation associated to "amber names".
Anyway, here is, from a German history blog, an attempt to re-construct the Roman Amber Route towards the Lower Vistula from "amber names". Decide for yourself how convincing that attempt is:
Pärnu (Estonia) - Brandenburg (Königsberg) - Braniewo (Brennsberg) - Brusy - Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) - Barcin - Wrzesnia - Wreschen - Prosna - Berndorf - Wroclaw (Breslau) - Bernstadt - Broumov (Braunau) - Brandys - Bystrice nad Pernsteynem - Pernstejn - Brno (Brünn) - Slavkov u Brna - Breclav (Lundenburg) - Bratislava (Pressburg) - Parndorf - Brennbergbanya - Sopron - Bernstein - Brestanica - Bresternica (= Maribor) - Aquileia.
For the more daring, below a link to a PDF map that attempts to reconstruct a pan-European amber trade network based on assumed amber names (Burnmouth, Brest, Pyrenees, Pernik, Pirin, Brindisi etc.)
http://www.archaeologie-online.de/fo...nge/anhang245/
Some suggestions are pretty unlikely - there is, e.g., a couple of more plausible explanations for the name "Hamburg" than deriving it from "amburo", especially since we know from Ptolemy that in antiquity it was called "Treva", relating to its position at the crossing of three major amber roads (along the Elbe, down from Jutland to the Western Harz, and from Lübeck on the Baltic Sea towards the Rhineland). Berlin is most likely derived from old Slavic 'berlo' (swamp, wetland), and not from amber. And if Antwerp (Spanish Amberes) is really an amber name, I also doubt..
The antique Greek name of the Dnieper, Borysthenes, OTOH, may very well relate to Germanic "Bernstein", as we know that one of the eastern amber roads followed that river. So, feel free to check your area of residence for any place names that may indicate a yet undocumented branch of the pan-European amber trade network.