Archaeologists share findings that rewrite the history of gambling with 12,000-year old discovery

Dice might not seem like much these days, but their creation was a revolution at the time. It allowed for humans to explore the concept of randomness and probabilities. And the understanding of these concepts are foundational to statistics, quantum mechanics, and our entire modern scientific background.

While there are records from the first Europeans who arrived in North America witnessing Native Americans playing complex dice games, it turns out that this tradition goes back much further than previously realized. A recent study of Native American artifacts found that hunter-gatherers in what is now the western United States were playing dice games thousands of years before they were developed in Bronze Age civilizations in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.

The Las Vegas of prehistoric America

Hundreds of sets of dice have been found at archaeological sites across the United States but many were misidentified or overlooked. Ph.D. student Robert Madden took on the task of reclassifying them using a checklist that he developed with the aid of Stewart Culin’s 1907 book Games of the North American Indians, an exhaustive work that documented all the games Native Americans had played in the past.

With this he was able to identify that Native American hunter-gatherers some 12,000 years ago were already using dice to play games not only for fun but to also barter with other tribes. He published his findings in American Antiquity.

While similar artifacts have been found in New Mexico and Wyoming from the same time period, one location in particular, the Lindenmeier Site in Colorado near the border with Wyoming, has been a gold mine of ancient dice from the Pleistocene Folsom period. It is believed that this place was an aggregation site where tribes would meet to exchange with each other on a yearly basis.

These dice aren’t like the typical six-sided ones that we are familiar with but rather two sided with markings on one side and none of the other. They were primarily made from wood, but also other materials, especially bone.

Based on early European colonists’ accounts, dice games were mainly played by Native American women, around 70% of the witnessed accounts reported about games that only involved women. Madden says that this gender component raises some interesting questions that should be followed up with future research.

“I think the invention of dice really needs to be understood as both an intellectual achievement and a social technology that are really unique,” he explained on Colorado State University’s The Audit podcast.

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