Native American tribes in the western United States invented dice more than 12,000 years ago, providing archaeologists with the world’s earliest evidence of gambling and perhaps the earliest use of probability, a new study finds. However, the purpose of these games of chance was very different from modern gambling: the games helped people (mostly women, with a hint of evidence) to interact with new acquaintances and redistribute goods and wealth.
“Native Americans have a deep history of dice, games of chance, and gambling,” Colorado State University archaeologist Robert Madden told Live Science. “This predates any evidence of dice in the Old World by 6,000 years.”
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“This is the first evidence that humans are structurally committed to the concepts of chance and randomness,” Madden said. “We’re looking at really complex practices and intellectual achievements here.”
To identify prehistoric dice, Madden first turned to the 100-year-old book Games of the North American Indians by anthropologist Stewart Currin, which collected historical accounts of Native American games. Klin described dice as a “binary lot,” a flat or curved object that has a specific pattern or color on one side and is blank on the other side. Tossing a binary lot and letting it fall randomly was similar to flipping a coin, and Native Americans often tossed multiple lots to produce mathematically complex results.
Madden used Kulin’s description to search archaeological archives for artifacts that could be dice. He found 565 “diagnostic” and 94 “probable” examples of dice at 58 archaeological sites in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. However, dice did not exist in the eastern half of America until the arrival of Europeans.
“Dice tend to appear in liminal spaces where there is a lot of maneuverability,” Madden explained. “It may have something to do with how far apart these people are and the need to engage with people you don’t see often.” So the dice game may have been invented as a “social technology of integration” or as an icebreaker for strangers who wanted to exchange goods, information or company, he said.
The first three dice Madden discovered were from the Folsom Culture sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, which are about 12,900 years old. These people were hunter-gatherers known for their unique stone tools called Folsom Points. “Folsom people loved exotic and beautiful materials,” Madden said, and they traveled long distances to source stones such as flint and chalcedony. A game of chance might have allowed the people of Folsom to exchange their favorite stones.
Whereas modern gambling is often done alone against a “house”, such as using a slot machine in a casino or betting on horse races, Indigenous gambling involved more one-on-one personal interaction, the odds tended to become 50-50 over time, and the stakes were traded items such as leather or a set of semi-precious stones, Madden said.
“It’s a kind of leveling device found in many cultures with egalitarian social structures,” he says.
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Based on historical accounts of Indigenous gambling, Madden said that in more than 80 per cent of dice games the participants were exclusively female. It’s unclear whether this number can be extended to the distant past, but Indigenous women “may have been at the forefront of trying to use this social technology to create connections between people,” he said.
One of the study’s most important findings is that the earliest Native American dice are thousands of years older than dice found in Eurasia, Madden said. Approximately 5,500 to 7,000 years ago, dice appeared in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Western Caucasus. Historians of mathematics often point to the invention of the dice as a key step in humanity’s discovery of the randomness and probability of the universe.
“But we see this happening in hunter-gatherer Native American societies during the late Pleistocene (126,000 to 11,700 years ago),” Madden said. “This represents an important socio-technical intellectual achievement,” he said, adding that it reveals that the understanding and use of probability may have begun in the New World.
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