Ancient Games Used Dice

A new study identified playing dice that are as much as 12,000 years old.

Courtesy Robert Madden

Archaeologist Robert Madden believes that these ancient Native American objects are dice.

From Monopoly to TENZI to Yahtzee, there’s a wide range of games that involve dice. But people were playing with dice long before those games were invented. A new study suggests that Native Americans were playing dice games about 12,000 years ago.

Robert Madden of Colorado State University in the United States led the study. Madden is an archaeologist, a person who studies ancient human life. He knew that people in a part of the world that is now Iraq used dice nearly 6,000 years ago and wondered if people in North America were using the playing pieces before that. He started by looking at ancient Native American objects to find any that might be dice.

Unlike the six-sided dice that are used in many board games, ancient dice often are two-sided. So to find Native American dice, Madden looked for two-sided wood or bone objects with carved or painted markings on one or both sides.

Courtesy Robert Madden

Archaeologist Robert Madden looks through a microscope.

Madden found 565 objects he believes were dice. The objects had been discovered in the middle and western parts of the United States. All of them were thousands of years old, and at least 14 of them were as much as 12,000 years old. No matter what their age, they were all similar, suggesting they were all used for the same thing—probably playing games.

Madden says the ancient dice are evidence that early Native Americans played games of chance. Different groups of Native Americans probably played games with each other.

“The dice became a way for people that don’t know each other well…to come together to exchange, to meet, to talk,” Madden told the Rocky Mountain Collegian. “It’s because there’s this shared understanding of the game. We both understand the game. We both understand that it’s fair.”

Did You Know?

The word dice is plural. Just one is called a die. Every side of a die must be the same size for the die to roll fairly. The d120 (shown above) is a die with 120 sides, thought to be the largest number of sides possible.

Bison Make a Comeback

American Prairie

If you could travel back in time, hundreds of years ago, you’d find as many as 50 or 60 million bison roaming the American prairie. But by 1900, only a few hundred bison were left. Today, a group called American Prairie is helping wild bison make a comeback as part of an effort to preserve the prairies of the United States.

The bison population fell because the United States government encouraged white settlers to hunt the animals. Settlers killed bison faster than the bison population could keep up. This was very different from the way Native American, or American Indian, groups had treated bison for thousands of years. Prairie Indians like the Sioux relied on bison meat and hides for their survival, and bison were a respected part of their cultures and traditions. When settlers nearly killed off the bison population, prairie Indians were devastated or badly harmed.

In the early 1900s, the U.S. government began working to conserve, or save, the bison. They put a group of surviving bison in Yellowstone National Park, where the numbers of bison began to grow. After many years, some bison began to return to the wild. But the landscape has changed a lot since the 1800s. There are more houses, farms, and roads, and less open land where the bison can roam. While the bison population is now about 500,000, most American bison don’t live in the wild. They live on ranches and farms.

Today, a group called American Prairie is working to bring wild bison back by recreating the prairie as it used to be. The group plans to do this on a three-million-acre (12-billion-square-meter) piece of protected land called a reserve. The goal is to provide bison and other wildlife with the habitat where they once thrived. Recently, American Prairie announced that more than 1,000 bison now live on the reserve.

The bison population is still a tiny fraction of what it once was. But thanks to years of hard work, it’s on the rise.

Native American Heritage Month

© Jeffrey Isaac Greenberg 8+, Cavan Image/Alamy, © grandriver—E+/Getty Images, Sgt. Sarah D. Sangster—U.S. Army Photo/U.S. Department of Defense, © François Robert-Durand—AFP/Getty Images, © Richard Tsong-Taatarii—Star Tribune/Getty Images; Photo composite Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

November is Native American Heritage Month in the United States. This is a time to recognize the cultures, traditions, and histories of the country’s Indigenous peoples, who are sometimes called American Indians and Alaska Natives.

You can learn more at Britannica!

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