For many years, archaeologists have recognized that the ancient peoples of North America engaged in numerous games, reflecting a universal human pastime. Historically, the origins of dice were believed to be rooted in the ancient cultures of Eastern Europe and the Near East, including Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Caucasus. However, a recent study by Robert Madden, published by Cambridge University Press, suggests that games of chance originated much earlier than previously thought, emerging in a different part of the world.
While it was once believed that dice appeared around 5,500 years ago, Madden’s research indicates that some of the earliest dice were actually found in North America, dating back to the Late Pleistocene era, or the Ice Age. Notable examples of these ancient dice have been discovered in present-day Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. These areas are linked to the Folsom Culture, which was characterized by a widespread hunter-gatherer lifestyle across the North American West, Southwest, and Great Plains approximately 12,000 years ago.
Madden observed, in an interview with Live Science, that “the dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility. 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.”
Madden further explained in his report that the creation and use of dice marked humanity’s initial attempts to deliberately create, observe, and document sequences of controlled random events. This suggests that, for the first time, people were beginning to understand patterns in probability—a precursor to the modern law of large numbers. Anthropologists view this as a significant early step in humanity’s growing understanding of randomness and the probabilistic nature of the universe.
By comparing numerous examples uncovered across the American West, Madden drew parallels with the extensive work titled Games of the North American Indians, published in 1907 as part of an annual report by the Bureau of American Ethnology. This work is currently available in a two-volume edition from Bison Books.
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