Madden was able to definitively identify 565 Native American dice from 45 different sites and designate an additional 94 artifacts as “probable” dice. Objects with drilled or pierced holes were excluded from his assessment because they might have been beads or other ornaments rather than gold. He also excluded, for similar reasons, objects whose two sides could be distinguished only by shape, and which had no clear markings. The oldest artifacts from the Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico date to the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago.
According to Madden, dice and games in these societies were not the same as modern gambling, where the house always had the upper hand; rather, they likely served a social function.
“These games are one-on-one; no home” Madden said. “It’s fair game, everyone has equal opportunities, equal conditions, and it was used as a form of exchange, especially between groups of people who didn’t come into contact with each other very often, so they didn’t really know each other. It is truly a form of gifting over time that creates lasting interactions. It’s not about a commercial operation where you and I will change something and then go our separate ways.”
The findings also shed light on early Native American notions of probability. “When we see the origins of dice, we literally see the origins of probability,” Madden said. “It was always thought to start in the Old World, about 6,000 years ago in the Bronze Age. This study shows that 6,000 years ago, Native Americans were making dice, making random results, and using these random probability streams and using them in games of chance. So if we want to understand the history of Old World thinking, we need to look at the end of probability now. Age.”
Madden added, “These findings do not argue that Ice Age hunter-gatherers engaged in formal probability theory.” “But they deliberately created, observed, and relied on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that used probabilistic patterns like the law of large numbers. This is important to how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.”
American Antiquity, 2026. DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2025.10158 (About DOIs).
