The history of gambling goes back much further than anyone imagines. This new discovery dramatically changes the date of a key intellectual moment in the history of human culture: the realization that some events in the natural world are random and cannot be controlled by anyone.
All games of chance, from Yahtzee to horse racing betting, rely on probability, which is a relatively unintuitive concept. Archaeologists have therefore been careful to document early examples, such as dice used in games played by North Americans 2,000 years ago. They have found similar-looking objects at even older sites, but these fragments are too small, featureless, and isolated in the archaeological record to be positively identified.
New analysis by archaeologist Robert J. Madden published today in the journal ancient history of america, That will change. Madden scoured this sparse record, confirming the oldest known dice, stretching back at least 12,000 years, 6,000 years earlier than any of their Old World counterparts, and establishing an unbroken lineage of hitherto hidden chance-based games.
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“This is the most provocative paper I’ve seen in North American archeology in at least the last five years,” said Robert Weiner, an archaeologist at Dartmouth College. “It’s great to demonstrate the contributions of Native Americans to the world’s intellectual history.”
Madden became interested in the origins of the game of chance when he saw a certain line. A 2001 paper by the late anthropologist Warren DeBoer This alludes to the numerous small objects found in North American ruins and thought to be possible game pieces.
Archaeologists had identified the more recent double-sided “dice” (basically an object with two sides, like a modern coin), thanks to the ethnographic accounts of early European settlers who observed Native Americans playing the game.
Games “were often very noisy with large crowds,” Madden said. The rules were often too complicated for inexperienced spectators to follow, but it involved throwing a bunch of dice and seeing how many “heads” came up.
Many discoverers of old astronomical objects suspected that a predecessor of the same tool had been discovered, but they could not be sure. “There’s avoidant uncertainty,” Madden said. “Everyone’s like, ‘I don’t even know what I’m looking at here.'”
Madden used these later identified specimens to establish a set of standards for what these dice were like. Some have distinctive notches carved along their outer edges, while others have flat and curved sides and look like small vertically cut sticks. These shapes were intentionally created by the manufacturer to produce random results.
He then went back through the records and looked for these characteristics in earlier works. This meant spending countless hours combing through online databases to extract features from photographs of tiny pieces found scattered across the continent over the past century. “It took forever,” he says. The oldest dice specimens Madden identified came from sites in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, but the study notes that the apparent concentration in the American West may simply be from where these sites were preserved and excavated.
Madden credits the generations of archaeologists who did the initial preliminary work of assembling this record, as well as the online databases that made it available to a single researcher. “I don’t think we could have done that 25 years ago.”
He hopes his research will crystallize this scattered dataset for further investigation by others. “This seems like an area that really needs a lot of research,” he says. “The goal this time was just to break through.”
Gabriel Janicki of Carleton University said Madden’s discovery “makes the dice games played by Roman soldiers and those found in Tutankhamun’s tomb look young by comparison.”
But “it’s more than just slowing down time,” Janicki said. It confirms and extends something unique to the Americas. This means that humans here have long used games of chance as a social excuse for groups to come together and trade, even if they don’t share a language. “It’s something of a mystery why the economic utility of gambling is so widely accepted compared to other parts of the world,” Janicki says.
Additionally, Weiner points out that games represent “a way for people to grapple intellectually and in some ways spiritually with the universal human question of why things happen.”
Gambling requires a basic understanding, or at least awareness, of the concept of probability. Madden predicted that early civilizations would have thought that all events were due to some predictable force, just as young children struggle to understand randomness. “The idea that something is uncaused requires a leap,” he says. Probability theory was a latecomer in the history of mathematics. It was developed just 300 to 500 years ago by mathematicians trying to understand how games of chance work.
But gambling requires you to believe that there is something truly unpredictable in nature. The game of chance reflects the invention of a cultural technology that is the direct ancestor of all modern statistics and, indeed, all empirical science.
“When you start flipping coins and writing down the results, you’re invoking a kind of randomness,” Madden says. “You start to see these patterns emerge, and not only can you see them, but you can also take advantage of them.”
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