Source: The Conversation – in French– By Aris Politopoulos, Assistant Professor in Archaeology and Cultural Politics, Leiden University
Human beings have always had a taste for play. But for most of our history, play has left few traces. Unlike tools or bones, games rarely preserve well, and the ephemeral pleasures they provide are even harder to recover.
The recent discovery of 12,000-year-old remains, published inAmerican Antiquity, brings new insight into the playful nature of human societies in a distant past.
Archaeologist Richard J. Madden identified 565 arrowheads from sites across North America, notably in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. They date from the 19th centuryeMillennia-old and dating back up to 12,000 years. The recognition of these artifacts as dice pushes back by several thousand years the material evidence of gaming in humans, through what Madden interprets as evidence of games of chance and betting.He considersthat the Amerindians were playing dice 6,000 years before anyone else.
To identify these objects as dice, Madden gathered data on comparable objects from archaeological publications and artifact databases, relying on a previous studyexhaustive list of Amerindian game objects.
Binary dice
These objects do not resemble the six-sided dice we use today. They are rather binary dice: flat, round or rectangular pieces marked on one side and blank on the other. If you are a fan ofDungeons & Dragonslike us, you might call such a device rolling a d2. Indeed, one can compare rolling one of these ancient dice to a coin toss – although this discovery also highlights that dice are much older than coins.
When evaluating revolutionary research of this kind, it is essential to consider the nature of the archaeological remains from this very distant past. We depend on a very limited range of objects, as many do not survive in the soil. Often, even today, when we play, we do not use any physical objects. Think of a game of tag or hide and seek. Now imagine a similar game taking place 12,000 years ago. Could an archaeologist ever find traces of it?
Even when the game requires equipment, as in board games, the traces are often not preserved.
Indeed, someethnographic studiesof thestudieshave shown that people frequently play board games in a way that leaves no archaeological trace. For many games, people dig holes and draw lines on the ground to turn it into a board, and use stones, seeds, shells, and even dried animal excrement as pieces.
Natural objects also do the job: somesticks with two endsand ofcowries (shells)can be used as binary dice. This is not only a practice of the past or particular to remote regions: everywhere in the world, games are played daily using creatively all kinds of objects – bottle caps, cans, string, sticks, stones and other odds and ends – which are not easily identifiable as toys. That is why, for us archaeologists studying play, dice are special discoveries, because they are unequivocally tools used for playing.
The ancient dice
Archaeologists find dice more often than you might think, in all kinds of interesting forms. One of the most famous examples is that of thethe astragals, the ankle bones of hoofed animals (mainly sheep and goats). They have four distinct faces and were commonly used as dice.
One of the oldest games in human history, the20 Questions game(a later version ofRoyal Game of Ur), is known to have used such dice, as talus bones were found in thedrawers of game boxes. In many cases, rather than taking these bones from slaughtered animals, people reproduced them in other materials such as stone, glass, or metal. Someivory specimenswere discovered with the games found in the Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamun. This suggests that people only began making objects resembling dice after having already used natural objects adapted for the same purpose.
In his study, Madden argues that dice testify to a continuous evolution of games involving an economic dimension. We wish to steer this debate in another direction. Play exists outside the framework of gambling or games involving transactions, and the necessary contextual analysis to truly identify gambling in the past is lacking in this study. Furthermore, this study approaches play exclusively from a functionalist perspective, particularly through evolutionary and economic frameworks.
We have argued elsewherethat studies like these rarely take into account a fundamental point: the game often exists solely for the pleasure of playing. Sometimes, the coin is tossed to win, but often, it is tossed just for fun.
Although we are not convinced that these ancient Amerindian peoples managed gambling networks, this is an exciting discovery. What these dice, as well as others found in archaeological contexts around the world, highlight is thefascinating beauty of the game, today as in the past. So, the next time you roll dice, know that you are participating in the same playful spirit – the suspense, the joy, the disappointment of a bad throw – that people already felt 12,000 years ago.
Aris Politopoulos received funding under the start-up grant “Archaeological Futures” and the Ammodo Science Award for Groundbreaking Research for the project Past
Play. Aria is a member of the board of directors of the Stichting VALUE foundation.
Angus Mol received funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under the NWO-VIDI grant “Playful Time Machines” and the Ammodo prize for innovative scientific research, for the project PastPlay. He is a member of the board of directors of the VALUE foundation.
Walter Crist received funding from the COST program (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) for the GameTable project: Computer techniques for the heritage of board games, and from Game-in-Lab for the project “Play and the City”: Study of the cultural heritage of games in the city of Rome. He sits on the board of directors of the Cyprus-American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI).
–ref. Archaeologists have discovered dice that are 12,000 years old: here is what they teach us about the history of the game –https://theconversation.com/archeologists-have-discovered-12-000-year-old-dice-heres-what-they-teach-us-about-the-history-of-the-game-282191