Colorado State University archaeologist says Native Americans were crafting dice and playing games of chance as far back as 12,000 years ago, long before such practices were thought to exist outside the Old World.
Diagnostic and probable prehistoric Native American dice: (a, d) Signal Butte, Nebraska (Middle Holocene); (b) Agate Basin, Wyoming (Early Holocene); (c, f) Agate Basin, Wyoming (Late Pleistocene); (e, g) Lindenmeier, Colorado (Late Pleistocene); (h) Irvine, Wyoming (Late Holocene). Image credit: Division of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History / Department of Anthropology, University of Wyoming.
“Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” said Colorado State University Ph.D. student Robert Madden, author of the new study.
“What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes, and using those outcomes in structured games, thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.”
The earliest examples identified by Madden come from Folsom sites dating to roughly 12,800-12,200 years ago.
Unlike modern cubic dice, these were two-sided dice known as binary lots, carefully crafted, small pieces of bone that were flat or slightly rounded, often oval or rectangular in shape, sized to be held in the hand and tossed in groups onto a playing surface.
The two faces of these binary lots were distinguished by applied markings, surface treatments, coloration, or other visible modifications, much like heads or tails on a coin, with one face designated as the counting side.
When thrown, they reliably landed with one side or the other facing upward, producing a binary (two-outcome) result.
Sets of these dice were cast together, and scores were determined by how many landed with the counting face up.
“They’re simple, elegant tools. But they’re also unmistakably purposeful. These are not casual byproducts of bone working. They were made to generate random outcomes,” Madden said.
Rather than relying on subjective resemblance or guesswork, the study introduces a new attribute-based morphological test for identifying North American dice archaeologically.
The test was derived from a comparative analysis of 293 sets of historic Native American dice documented across the continent by ethnographer Stewart Culin in his 1907 monograph, Games of the North American Indians.
The study then applies this test systematically to the published archaeological record, essentially re-examining artifacts long labeled as possible gaming pieces or otherwise overlooked to determine whether they meet the new objective criteria for dice.
In most cases, the evidence had been in the archaeological record for decades, but without a clear standard for identifying dice, it had never been analyzed as part of a larger pattern.
Using this approach, Madden identified over 600 hundred diagnostic and probable dice from sites spanning every major period of North American prehistory, from the Late Pleistocene through and after the period of European contact.
“In most cases, these objects had already been excavated and published,” Madden said.
“What was missing wasn’t the evidence, it was a clear, continent-wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at.”
“The findings don’t claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory,” Madden said.
“But they were intentionally creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers. That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.”
The study also documents the remarkable breadth, as well as the persistence, of Native American dice games.
From Paleoindian times through the Archaic and Late Prehistoric periods, dice appear at 57 archaeological sites across a 12-state region associated with a variety of different cultures and subsistence strategies.
“This breadth of use and endurance reflects their social importance,” Madden said.
“Games of chance and gambling created neutral, rule-governed spaces for ancient Native Americans.”
“They allowed people from different groups to interact, exchange goods and information, form alliances, and manage uncertainty. In that sense, they functioned as powerful social technologies.”
The study was published in the journal American Antiquity.
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Robert J. Madden. Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling. American Antiquity, published online April 2, 2026; doi: 10.1017/aaq.2025.10158
