Indigenous people in the western United States invented dice more than 12,000 years ago, offering archaeologists the world’s oldest evidence of gambling and possibly the oldest use of probability, a new study reveals. But the purpose of these games of chance was very different from modern-day gambling, as the games helped people — mostly women, evidence hints — interact with new acquaintances and redistribute goods and wealth.
“There is a deep history of dice, games of chance and gambling in Native America,” Robert Madden, an archaeologist at Colorado State University, told Live Science. “This precedes any evidence we have of dice in the Old World by 6,000 years.”
In a study published Thursday (April 2) in the journal American Antiquity, Madden looked at more than 600 sets of Native American dice from 45 prehistoric archaeological sites in the western U.S. from 13,000 to 450 years ago. He discovered that dice were present at Indigenous sites on both sides of the Rocky Mountains throughout this lengthy period.
“This is the first evidence we have of structured human engagement with the concepts of chance and randomness,” Madden said. “We’re seeing really complex practices and an intellectual accomplishment here.”
To identify the prehistoric dice, Madden first turned to a century-old book called “Games of the North American Indians” by Stewart Culin, an anthropologist who gathered historic accounts of Native American games. Culin described the dice as “binary lots” where one side of the flat or curved object was marked with a specific pattern or color and the other side was blank. Tossing a binary lot and allowing it to fall at random is similar to flipping a coin, and Indigenous people would often toss multiple lots to produce mathematically complicated outcomes.
Using Culin’s descriptions, Madden searched archaeological archives for artifacts that could be dice. He found 565 “diagnostic” examples of dice and 94 “probable” examples across 58 archaeological sites in the Great Plains and the Rockies. But there were no dice in the eastern half of the U.S. until after the arrival of Europeans.
“The dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility,” Madden explained. “It might have something to do with how separated these people are and the need to relate to people you don’t see very often.” That is, dice games may have been invented as a “social technology of integration,” he said, or an icebreaker for strangers who wanted to exchange goods, information or mates.
Hellbound and Down 