Recent findings featured in the journal American Antiquity suggest that dice were first used over 12,000 years ago, significantly earlier than previously assumed. These Pleistocene-era artifacts, crafted by Native Americans, predate other dice discoveries, mostly from the Bronze Age, by more than six millennia. Dice symbolize an understanding of randomness and unpredictability. “At the end of the last Ice Age, these are not the people we think are going to be diving into complex intellectual concepts. But they seem to be doing exactly that,” commented Robert J. Madden, an archaeologist from Colorado State University and author of the study, in an interview with Hyperallergic.
Madden’s research primarily focuses on the classification of dice. While historical records indicate Native American dice usage 2,000 years ago, connecting these with earlier, less distinct findings has been challenging for archaeologists. “Early in the process, I started finding some of these really early pieces, and there was this sense of, ‘Well, we don’t know what these things are,’” Madden explained. He extensively utilized Stewart Culin’s 1907 publication, Games of the North American Indians, which documented 293 sets of Native American dice, to create objective criteria for analyzing archaeological collections.
In his study, Madden has categorized over 600 artifacts from 57 archaeological sites, mainly in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, as dice. However, not everyone agrees with Madden’s conclusions. Jelmer Eerkens, an anthropology professor at the University of California, expressed to CNN that more contextual information about where these pieces were found is necessary to determine their purpose. Unlike the traditional six-sided dice, Madden’s ancient finds are two-sided “binary lots” used for social interactions among tribes, he suggests.
“The games created a neutral space. Everybody understood they had an equal chance of success,” Madden noted. These artifacts, made from wood or bone (and occasionally teeth), have one decorated side and one plain side. The intricate designs differentiate them from other Pleistocene finds, indicating an early artistic inclination linked to concepts of chance. “Probability, chance, randomness — these aren’t just ideas,” Madden shared with Hyperallergic. “They’re real features of the physical world, and through these games the dice bring randomness out into the open, they clean it up, they make it so that you can see these patterns.”
