Dice

Lore & Background

Dice have been used since before recorded history, with their origin uncertain. It is hypothesized that they developed from fortune-telling with the talus of hoofed animals, known as knucklebones. The Ancient Egyptian game of senet used flat two-sided throwsticks as dice.

Reader's Guide

Dice are significant as one of the oldest tools for generating randomness, appearing across cultures from ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley to Greece and Rome. Their use in games of chance and skill has persisted for millennia, influencing the development of dominoes and playing cards in China. The standard six-sided die with opposite faces summing to seven has been found in ancient Indus Valley settlements, showing remarkable continuity. Modern manufacturing distinguishes precision dice (used in casinos, transparent, with flush markings) from non-precision dice (opaque, with recessed markings). Loaded dice, designed to favor certain results, highlight the ongoing tension between fair play and cheating.

Did You Know?

• Precision casino dice are transparent to make it difficult to incorporate internal weights.
• Asian style dice often have red pips on the one and four faces, possibly of Indian origin.

Sacred Purpose Beyond Play

Games among early Native American tribes were far more than casual pastimes. Observers in the early 1700s recorded that athletic contests and card or dice games served religious, political, and communal functions across groups including the Algonquian, Cherokee, Iroquoian, Sioux, Lakota, and Choctaw. Games also brought entire communities together around a shared purpose. For children, these activities taught hand-eye coordination, discipline, and the value of respectful effort. Stickball, in particular, functioned as a mechanism for resolving inter-tribal disputes that might otherwise have escalated into full-scale warfare. The physical intensity of the sport meant players frequently sustained injuries, yet its popularity endured across a wide range of nations who contested one another repeatedly. This layered significance—spiritual, diplomatic, educational, and recreational—demonstrates how deeply woven play was into the fabric of indigenous life.

Stickball: The Little Brother of War

Stickball stands as the most celebrated athletic tradition among early American indigenous peoples, and it is the direct ancestor of modern lacrosse. Known as the "Little Brother of War," the sport was often embedded within actual conflicts between rival villages, with flexible rules and boundaries that varied by region. Players wielded sticks fitted with nets at the top, passing a ball among teammates and attempting to hurl it into a designated goal. The scale of these events was staggering: matches could stretch across multiple days in vast open fields, with goals separated by anywhere from five hundred yards to several miles, and rosters ranging from one hundred to ten thousand men. The Cherokee and Choctaw were well documented playing the game in the 1700s. The tradition has not faded; today the Cherokee along with the Muscogee, Seminole, Yuchi, and Natchez continue to play using rules remarkably close to those of their ancestors. The sport's physicality meant injuries were common, yet its cultural centrality kept it alive across centuries.

Wagers and the Culture of Gambling

Betting was woven into nearly every competitive activity in early Native American life. Tribes staked horses, food, and personal possessions on the outcomes of chunkey, stickball, dice games, and archery contests, turning wagering into a deeply embedded cultural practice. The stakes could escalate far beyond material goods. As Martin Rizzo documents in his study of prehistoric games, some gamblers risked their own bodies to enslavement, and tribal slave owners would gamble their enslaved people. Among the peoples of the Upper Columbia River, the consequences were especially severe: gamblers could lose family members, including wives and children, to slavery through bets placed on game outcomes. This tradition of high-stakes competition over games of skill and chance has left a lasting imprint. The persistence of gambling culture among many American Indian communities today is often traced directly back to these ancestral practices, where the thrill of risk and the social weight of a wager made every contest a matter of profound personal and communal consequence.

Craft, Materials, and the Objects of Play

The physical objects used in indigenous games reflected remarkable craftsmanship and held deep cultural value. Chunkey, played in the Mississippi Valley by groups including the Bayogoulas and Choctaw, involved throwing spear-like poles eight to fifteen feet long at rolling hoops, or in later Choctaw versions observed in the 1770s, sliding circular stone disks across a clay field at least two hundred feet long. James Adair, who lived among the Chickasaws in the mid-1700s, noted that chunkey stones were treasured heirlooms, passed down through generations and carefully stored between games. Archery equipment was equally refined: bows were crafted from long hardwoods such as hickory, black locust, ash, elm, and ironwood, while arrowheads were fashioned from antler, copper, or wood, though stone tips were the most prized for their strength. The Iroquois Bowl Game, played with colored balls and sticks, and the dice games favored by the Iroquois and Lakota further illustrate the diversity of material culture surrounding play.