In dusty excavation reports and antiquarian volumes, a lawyer-turned-archaeologist has uncovered evidence that upends the known history of human gambling.The findings, published Thursday in the journal American Antiquity, suggest that Native Americans had dice and games of probability 12,000 years ago. That’s thousands of years earlier than the practice is thought to have existed anywhere in the Old World — Europe, Africa or Asia.The study says such activities, based on the concepts of chance, randomness and probability, were first developed in the present-day Southwestern U.S. — not in Mesopotamia or by other ancient cultures.AdvertisementAdvertisement“We see it right in North America, beginning 12,000 years ago, people really starting to engage with some really complex kinds of intellectual concepts that aren’t grappled with in the Old World until many thousands of years later,” said Robert Madden, a doctoral student at Colorado State University, who is the study’s author. “These concepts end up being foundational to our modern scientific understanding, our modern economy.”Madden, 62, was a trial lawyer for about 25 years before he began pursuing archaeology. He spent about three years combing through old archaeological site reports to build the timeline in his study. Before this, no one in the field had established criteria for what should be included in the archaeological record of dice.“I did not dig up any new Native American dice,” he said. “It just needed somebody to come along and pull it together.”Researchers have studied Native Americans’ use of dice for more than a century. The dice are almost always two-sided and made of bone or wood. They’re carefully shaped to produce random outcomes and marked or colored to indicate different sides.Early examples of dice fo …
