Native American Dice Date Back 12,000 Years, Rewriting History of Gaming

A recent study in American Antiquity has unveiled that dice crafted by Native Americans more than 12,000 years ago extend the timeline of gaming tools by 6,000 years. The research, led by Colorado State University archaeologist Robert J. Madden, uncovered over 600 artifacts from the Pleistocene era across 57 locations in the American West, mainly in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. These two-sided "binary lots," made from materials like wood, bone, or teeth, predate the known dice from the Bronze Age. Madden's classification was inspired by Stewart Culin's 1907 work, Games of the North American Indians, which cataloged 293 dice sets. While Madden believes these items reflect early concepts of chance, some scholars, including University of California's Jelmer Eerkens, argue that more contextual evidence is necessary to verify their purpose.