Humans have always been playful. But for much of our history, play has left little trace. Unlike tools or bones, games rarely preserve and the fleeting pleasures they produce are even harder to recover.

The recent discovery of 12,000-year-old dice, published in American Antiquity, however, sheds new light on the playfulness of human societies in the deep past.

Archaeologist Richard J. Madden identified 565 dice from sites across North America including Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. They dated from the 19th century all the way back to 12,000 years ago. The recognition of these artefacts as dice pushes back the material evidence for human play by thousands of years, which Madden interprets as evidence of games of chance and gambling. He believes that his study shows that Native Americans were gambling with dice 6,000 years earlier than anyone else.

To identify these objects as dice, Madden gathered data on comparable objects from archaeological publications and databases of remains, building on an earlier, comprehensive study of Native American play objects.

These objects do not resemble the six-sided dice we use today. Instead, they are binary: flat, round, or rectangular pieces marked on one side and blank on the other. If you are a Dungeons and Dragons geek like us, you might call such a casting device a d2. In effect, you can compare throwing one of these ancient dice to a coin toss – although this discovery also underscores that dice are much older than coins.

When evaluating groundbreaking research of this kind it is crucial to think about the nature of the archaeological record in this very deep past. We are dependent on a very limited range of objects, since many do not survive in the ground. Many times when we play, even in the present, we don’t use any material objects at all. Think of a game of tag or hide and seek. Now consider a similar game taking place 12,000 years ago. Could an archaeologist ever find evidence for that?

Even when play requires materials, such as in board games, the evidence is often not preserved. Indeed, ethnographic studies have shown that people frequently play board games in ways that archaeologists would almost never detect. For many games people scoop out holes and draw lines in the ground as boards and use stones, seeds, shells and even dried animal droppings as pawns.

Natural objects also work: two-sided sticks and cowry shells can be used as binary dice. This is not only a thing of the past or of foreign places. Around the world, play takes place every day that makes creative use of all sorts of objects – bottle caps, tin cans, twine, sticks and stones and other titbits – that are not easily identifiable as playthings. That is why to us, archaeologists who study play, dice are particularly special finds, because they are unambiguously playthings.

Ancient dice

Archaeologists find dice more often than you may think, in all sorts of interesting forms. One of the most famous examples are astragalus bones, the ankle bones of hooved animals (mostly sheep and goat). They have four distinct sides and have been commonly used as dice.

One of the oldest games in human history, the game of 20 squares (a later version of the Royal Game of Ur), is known to have used such dice because astragalus bones have been found in the drawers of game boxes. In many cases, rather than harvesting these bones from butchered animals, people replicated them in other materials such as stone, glass or metal. Ivory examples were found with the games in the Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamun. This suggests that people began making dice-like objects only after they had already been using naturally occurring objects suited to the same purpose.

In his study, Madden argues that dice are a continuous evolution of the type of economic transactions that underpin gambling. We would like to take the argument in a different direction. Play exists outside of gambling and the contextual analysis required to truly identify gambling in the past is absent from this study. Moreover, this study positions play exclusively in functionalist terms, particularly evolutionary and economic frameworks.

We have argued elsewhere that studies like these rarely consider a fundamental point: that play frequently exists for play’s sake. Sometimes you flip the coin to win it, but often you flip it just for fun.

Though we are not convinced these ancient Native American people were running prehistoric gambling rings, this is an exciting find. What these and other dice in archaeological contexts worldwide point to is the fascinating beauty of play, now and in the past. So the next time you roll some dice, realise you are taking part in the same sense of play – the suspense, the joy, the sting of a bad throw – that people also felt 12,000 years ago.