Madden was able to conclusively identify 565 Native American dice from 45 different sites and designate an additional 94 artifacts as “probable” dice. Objects with drilled or punched holes were excluded from their evaluation because they could easily have been beads or other decorative objects rather than dice. For similar reasons he also excluded objects whose two sides could be identified only by shape, without any obvious markings. The oldest artifacts recovered from Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico date back to the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago.
According to Madden, dice and gambling in these societies were nothing like contemporary gambling, where the house always has the edge; Rather, they probably served a social function.
“These games are one-on-one; There’s no homes there,” Madden said. ”It’s a fair game, everyone’s got equal opportunities, equal conditions, and it was used as an exchange, especially between groups of people who didn’t come into frequent contact with each other, so they didn’t really know each other. It is truly a form of gift giving over time that creates lasting interpersonal relationships. This is not about a commercial transaction where you and I will exchange something and then go our separate ways.
The findings also shed light on early Native American concepts of probability. Madden said, “When we look at the origins of dice, we are literally looking at the origins of probabilistic thinking.” “It’s always been thought that it started in the Old World, in the Bronze Age, about 6,000 years ago. This research shows that Native Americans were making dice, generating random outcomes and using those random streams of probability and using them in games of chance as early as 6,000 years ago. So, if we want to understand the history of probabilistic thinking, we now need to look to the Old World at the end of the last ice age.”
“These findings do not make the case that Ice Age hunters were operating on formal probability theory,” Madden said. “But they were deliberately creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that took advantage of probabilistic regularities such as the law of large numbers. This matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.”
American Antiquity, 2026. DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2025.10158 (About DOI).
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