Overview
- The peer-reviewed study, published Thursday in American Antiquity, concludes that hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains used two-sided dice more than 12,000 years ago.
- Researcher Robert J. Madden built an attribute-based test from Stewart Culin’s 1907 catalog of 293 historic sets and identified 565 diagnostic and 94 probable dice across 57 North American sites.
- The earliest confirmed examples come from Folsom-period contexts in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico dating to roughly 12,800–12,200 years ago, with one probable Clovis-era item possibly near 13,000 years old.
- The pieces are small bone or wood “binary lots” with clearly marked faces, sized to be tossed in groups so players counted how many landed with the designated face up in rule-based games of chance.
- The paper reclassifies already excavated artifacts and notes limits such as preservation gaps in the East and possible alternative uses like divination, yet it challenges Old World–first narratives about the roots of probabilistic thinking and social gaming.