Overview
- The peer-reviewed paper in American Antiquity, published Thursday, April 2, argues that Native Americans were using dice about 12,800–12,200 years ago.
- The earliest pieces are two-sided “binary lots,” small bone or wood slips with one marked face that were tossed in sets to produce simple up-or-down results.
- Author Robert J. Madden built a checklist from Stewart Culin’s 1907 survey and, using those traits, reidentified more than 600 likely dice from 57 sites across 12 states.
- The reinterpretation would place dice thousands of years before Bronze Age examples in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and links the games to gambling, trade, and alliance-building.
- Scholars such as Walter Crist see strong promise in the method, while critics like Jelmer Eerkens say morphology alone is insufficient and urge direct dating and stronger archaeological context in follow-up work.