Native Americans Used Dice Earlier Than Previously Known, Study Shows

2026-04-14 11:05:15

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Native American Dice Games May Date Back More Than 12,000 Years

A Colorado State University study is challenging a long-held timeline for one of humanity's oldest games of chance. Research published in American Antiquity argues that hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains were making and using dice more than 12,000 years ago, centuries before dice traditions are usually associated with Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.

The study, led by Robert J. Madden, a PhD student at Colorado State University (CSU), identifies the earliest examples at archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Those objects date to roughly 12,800–12,200 years ago. According to the research, they were made of bone or wood and were two-sided, with each face differentiated by markings or coloration so that a throw produced a binary outcome.

That detail gives the objects a particular significance. Dice games are often described as humanity's earliest structured encounter with randomness, an early step toward probabilistic thinking. Until now, the standard origin story placed the emergence of dice in complex societies of the Old World around 5,500 years ago.

Madden's work suggests a much older and more geographically expansive history. In comments to CSU's The Audit podcast, he said he was interested in tracing the practice further back after finding that the literature on Native American dice games extended to about 2,000 years before the present, then seemed to stop. His checklist of attributes for historic Native American dice helped him reclassify older artifacts and push the chronology deeper into the late Pleistocene.

The study also points to continuity. Madden said the games have persisted into the present, noting that people can still find groups playing them today. In that sense, the research does more than revise an archaeological timeline. It places a familiar object in a much longer cultural history, one that links ancient play, mathematical thought, and living Native American traditions.

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