Native American dice as old as 13,000 years – Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History and Wyoming University (SWNS)
Tribal casinos in the US may seem a more natural fit, after hearing about new research showing that Native Americans were making dice for gaming thousands of years before anyone else in the world.
Evidence revealed that the earliest known dice in human history were made and used by hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.
That was thousands of years before the earliest known dice from Bronze Age societies in Europe, Africa and Asia, according to scientists.
The new study, published in the journal American Antiquity, indicates that dice and games of chance have been a “persistent” feature of Native American culture for at least the last 12,000 years.
The earliest examples were from 12,800 years ago, discovered at archaeological sites from the Late Pleistocene Folsom era in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico—and the artifacts predate the earliest known Old World dice by more than 6,000 years.
“Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” said the study’s author Robert Madden.
“What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes, and using those outcomes in structured games, thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.”
Unlike modern cubic dice, they were two-sided “binary lots”—carefully crafted, small pieces of bone that were flat or slightly rounded, often oval or rectangular in shape, sized to be held in the hand and tossed in groups onto a playing surface.
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Folsom era Native American dice – Courtesy of the Department of Anthropology at University of Wyoming (via SWNS)
The two faces of the binary lots were distinguished by applied markings, surface treatments, colouration, or other visible modifications, much like heads or tails on a coin, with one face designated as the “counting” side.
When thrown, they reliably landed with one side or the other facing upward, producing a binary—or two-outcome—result.
Researchers say that sets of the dice were also cast together, and scores were determined by how many landed with the counting face up.
“They’re simple, elegant tools,” said Madden, a Ph.D. student at Colorado State University.
“But they’re also unmistakably purposeful. These are not casual by-products of bone-working. They were made to generate random outcomes.”
The study introduced a new test—a checklist of measurable physical features for identifying North American dice archaeologically—derived from a comparative analysis of 293 sets of such dice documented across the continent by Stewart Culin in his 1907 Bureau of American Ethnology book, Games of the North American Indians.
Native American ball games, 1845 illustration- The New York Public Library Digital Collections (cropped)
Researchers applied the test systematically to the published archaeological record, essentially re-examining artifacts long labeled as possible “gaming pieces” or otherwise overlooked to determine whether they meet the new objective criteria for dice.
In most cases, Madden said the evidence had been in the archaeological record for decades, but without a clear standard for identifying dice, it had never been analyzed as part of a larger pattern.
“What was missing was a clear, continent-wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at.”
Using the new approach, he identified more than 600 diagnostic and probable dice from sites spanning every major period of North American prehistory, beginning in the Late Pleistocene. They appeared at 57 archaeological sites across a 12-state region, associated with a variety of different cultures.
Historians of mathematics widely regard dice games as humanity’s earliest structured engagement with randomness, an intellectual precursor to probability theory, statistics, and later scientific thinking. Until now, the origins of such practices were thought to lie exclusively in Old World complex societies beginning around 5,500 years ago.
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“These findings (show) they were intentionally creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers.
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“That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.” But Madden had other theories, too.
“Games of chance and gambling created neutral, rule-governed spaces for ancient Native Americans. They allowed people from different groups to interact, exchange goods and information, form alliances, and manage uncertainty.
“In that sense, they functioned as powerful social technologies.”
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