The traditional six-sided die has been around since the Bronze Age, with the earliest known pieces from approximately 3000 BC uncovered in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Now, a new study has found evidence that Native Americans were likely using dice for gaming and gambling more than 6,000 years earlier, since the end of the last ice age.The dice looked different than the polyhedral shapes we’re used to playing with today. The oldest ones identified in the study were known as “binary lots.” These artifacts — found at archaeological sites from the Folsom Period in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico — date back roughly 12,800 to 12,200 years. The pieces were flat, two-sided dice crafted from wood or bone and could be tossed, similar to how we flip a coin today. The findings were reported in a paper published April 2 in the journal American Antiquity.Lead study author Robert J. Madden, a doctoral student of archaeology at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, argued that the evidence has been hiding in plain sight.AdvertisementAdvertisement“We’ve had a great record of this subject during the historical period after Europeans got here,” Madden said, referring to the past 1,000 to 2,000 years. “But then before that, we really didn’t know, like, how far does it go back before this? And that’s really what this paper adds.”The study creates new criteria for deciphering old dice and allows archaeologists to further explore how games have evolved over time, researchers say.Deciphering prehistoric diceBecause the dice were not the traditional cube shape, when they were initially uncovered archaeologists often referred to them as “gaming pieces,” Madden said. He noticed the gaps in the literature, particularly the lack of information about how dice were utilized before Europeans came to America, and wanted to come up with a way of identifying whether the pieces were used as dice.“I kind of picked up on that there were some of these really old examples — …
