Ancient Games Used Dice
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.”
