Native Americans crafted and used dice for games of chance over 12,000 years ago, according to a study published in American Antiquity. The artifacts, identified by Colorado State University graduate student Robert Madden, predate the earliest known Old World dice by millennia. The research reveals intentional reliance on random outcomes in structured games.
Robert Madden, a graduate student at Colorado State University, analyzed archaeological artifacts to confirm their use as dice. He developed four criteria: two-sided objects with distinguishable sides, specific shapes like flat bone, plano-convex, convex-concave, or convex-convex, and suitable size for hand-casting. Applying these to published finds, Madden verified 565 dice from 45 sites across North America and deemed 94 more as probable dice. The oldest, from Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, date to about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Objects with holes or unmarked shape differences were excluded to avoid misidentification as beads or decorations. Madden drew from Robert Stewart Culin's 1907 report on Native American games, which documented dice from 130 tribes. These binary lots, unlike six-sided modern dice, were common among tribes and used in one-on-one games without a house edge. Madden described them as tools for social exchange, fostering reciprocal relationships between groups. “These games are one-on-one; there’s no house,” he said. “It’s a fair game... used as a form of exchange, particularly between groups of people who did not come into frequent contact with each other. ” The study suggests early probabilistic thinking in the Americas, predating Old World examples by 6,000 years. “When we see the origins of dice, we’re literally seeing the origins of probabilistic thinking,” Madden stated, though he clarified it was not formal theory but intentional use of randomness in rule-based ways.