[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/DiceFig1revised.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tNative Americans were using dice for gaming long before Bronze Age societies in the Old World, according to a new Colorado State University study. Research published in the journal American Antiquity<\/em> by Robert J. Madden, a PhD student at CSU, presents evidence that dice were made by hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago.<\/p>\n \n\tGames of chance are considered humanity\u2019s earliest structured engagement with the idea of randomness, the intellectual precursor to probabilistic thinking. Until now, they were thought to have originated in the complex societies of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley beginning around 5,500 years ago.<\/p>\n \n\tAware that Native Americans have a long history of dice games, Madden created a checklist of specific attributes of historical Native American dice to reclassify older artifacts. \u201cWe had a body of literature that carried [the use of dice] all the way back to about 2,000 years before the present,\u201d Madden told CSU\u2019s The Audit<\/em> podcast, \u201cbut it broke down at that point. That got me interested\u00a0in\u00a0seeing\u00a0what\u00a0I could\u00a0do to trace this back.\u00a0How old is this actually?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe earliest examples identified in the Madden\u2019s study come from archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico dating to roughly 12,800\u201312,200 years ago. Unlike modern six-sided dice, ancient Native American dice were made of bone or wood and two-sided, with each face distinguished from the other by markings or coloration. When thrown, they would reliably land on one side or another, producing a binary result.<\/p>\n \n\tMadden notes that these dice games have persisted, saying \u201cThat\u2019s\u00a0one of\u00a0the remarkable\u00a0things about this. Usually, if you\u00a0see a\u00a0practice\u00a0from\u00a0a few thousand years ago,\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0exceedingly rare to see it continue.\u00a0With dice,\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0talking about\u00a0a\u00a0practice that\u00a0we now know goes\u00a0back to the late Pleistocene, 12,000 years ago. These games\u00a0are continuing. You can go on\u00a0YouTube\u00a0right now and find videos of groups getting together\u00a0and playing these games.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/native-american-dice-games-older-than-previously-known-1234781204\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/DiceFig1revised.jpg?w=1024″] Native Americans were using dice for gaming long before Bronze Age societies in the Old World, according to a new Colorado State University study. Research published in the journal American Antiquity by Robert J. Madden, a PhD student at CSU, presents evidence that dice were made by hunter-gatherers on the western Great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1882557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1882557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1882557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1882557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1882557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}