The history of gambling goes back further than anyone imagines. This new discovery drastically changes the date of a major intellectual moment in the history of human culture – the recognition that some events in nature are random, not under anyone’s control.
All games of chance, from Yahtzee to horse race betting, rely on probability, a relatively intuitive concept. So archaeologists have taken care to document the earliest examples, including dice used for games played by North Americans 2,000 years ago. They even discovered similar-looking objects at many ancient sites, but the pieces were individually too small and inconsistent, and too isolated in the archaeological record, to identify them with certainty.
A new analysis by archaeologist Robert J. Madden, published today in the journal American Antiquity, He changes. Madden combed through this rare record, confirming the oldest known dice and creating an unbroken, formerly secret line of games of chance that dates back at least 12,000 years, 6,000 before any rival in the Old World.
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“This is the most interesting paper I’ve seen in North American archeology in at least the last five years,” says Robert Weiner, an archaeologist at Dartmouth College. “It’s exciting to show this Native American contribution to global intellectual history.”
Madden became interested in the origins of games of chance when he was at A. Saw a line A 2001 paper by the late anthropologist Warren DeBoer Referring to a number of small objects found at archaeological sites in North America that are thought to be game pieces.
Archaeologists have recently identified double-sided “coins”—essentially things like today’s coins with “heads” and “tails” sides—thanks to ethnographic accounts of early European settlers playing Native Americans.
Madden says the games “were often grueling affairs with large groups of people.” The rules were often too complicated for inexperienced viewers to follow, but they dropped a bunch of these pieces and saw how many “heads” came up.
While many antiquities detectors suspect that they will find predecessors of similar devices, they are not certain. “There’s a significant amount of uncertainty,” Madden says. “Everybody’s like, ‘I don’t even know what we’re looking at here.’
Madden used these later confirmed samples to create a set of standards for what these pieces should look like. Some had characteristic notches on the outer edge, while others looked like small sticks cut lengthwise, with a flat, curved side—shapes that the makers deliberately created to produce random results.
Then he went back through the record looking for those features in previous pieces. That meant spending countless hours combing through online databases to pick out the features from photos of tiny pieces found scattered across the continent over the past century. “It took forever,” he says. The oldest confirmed Madden specimens come from sites in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico — but the study notes that the apparent concentration in the American West may come only from where these sites have been preserved and discovered.
Madden credits the generations of archaeologists who did the initial work of collecting the record—and the online databases that make it available to the single researcher. “I don’t think that would have been done even 25 years ago.”
He hopes his work will begin to crystallize this fragmented data set for others to investigate further. “It seems to me like an area that really calls for a lot of study,” he says. “It was just meant to break.”
Carleton University professor Gabriel Yankey says Madden’s findings “look younger than games played by Roman soldiers, or games found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.”
But “it’s more than turning back the clock,” Yankey says. This confirms and amplifies something unique to the Americas—that humans here have long used games of chance as a social excuse to band together and trade, even without sharing a language. Yannicki says: “Global acceptance of the economic benefits of gambling is a mystery compared to other parts of the world.
In addition, Weiner points out, games “represent a way that people engage, both in intellectual and kind of spiritual ways, with this universal human question of why things happen.”
Gambling requires a basic understanding, or at least familiarity, with the concept of probability. Madden expected that, like young children struggling to understand randomness, early civilizations would trace every event to some predictable force. “There’s a leap you have to make to the idea that there are things that don’t have a cause,” he says. Probability theory was a latecomer in the history of mathematics. It was created only 300 to 500 years ago – by mathematicians trying to understand how games of chance work.
But gambling requires you to believe that some things in nature are truly unpredictable. Games of chance reflect the invention of a cultural technology that is the direct counterpart of all modern statistics—and all empirical science.
“When you start flipping a coin and writing down the results, you’re making it sound kind of random,” Madden says. “You can start to see these patterns emerge, and even more than you can see, you can use them.”
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