Native American Gaming Pieces and "Dice" Shed Light on Promentory Culture in Utah

For the curious, please check out Stewart Culin's "Games of the North American Indians," a wonderful resource that is now available online (Holy Hathor!) It is a treasure trove of information gathered by Culin on various games and sports played by North American Indians including extensive drawings, oral traditions, and testimonies of various old-timers and collectors of gaming artifacts alive at the time Culin was traveling the North American continent collecting his information.

Article at Westerndigs.org

Hundreds of Dice, Game Pieces Found in Utah Cave Shed Light on Prehistoric Gambling

POSTED BY BLAKE DE PASTINO ON MAY 18, 2015 

A cave on the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake is giving archaeologists a rare glimpse into a seldom-studied aspect of life in the ancient West — prehistoric gambling.

Researchers exploring the cave, known simply as Cave 1, have identified hundreds of dice, hoops, carved sticks and other trinkets used in indigenous games of chance and skill.  Based on what they’ve found so far, they project that there are more than 10,000 such items still waiting to be uncovered, making it likely the largest deposit of ancient gambling artifacts ever found in the western U.S.

Excavations have revealed hundreds of gaming pieces, including these split-cane dice
and split sticks, which were used in dice and guessing games, archaeologists say.
(Photo courtesy Ives and Yanicki)

And it’s only part of the peculiar bounty that archaeologists have uncovered there.  Since the 1930s, Cave 1 has proven to hold a profusion of artifacts — including piles of butchered bison and elk bones and hundreds of moccasins, fashioned mostly for children — most of which date to a span of just 20 to 40 years in the late 13th century.

More Museum Photos from New Year's Eve 2011

Two photos of a bottom portion of a totem - I did not photograph the plaque describing it in detail, but it's from the U.S. Pacific Northwest and welcomes people into the Native American section on the second floor. 

This exhibit is from "Indian games" -- beautifully carved ivory dominoes,

playing cards, and in the next photo, a carved walrus tusk cribbage board.

At the top of the grand staircase that takes you to the first exhibit floor of the Milwaukee Public Museum, is a large display of fascinating things from the Museum's collection -- designed to catch the attention and spark the imagination of visitors, young and old.  This is (I believe) a Maori war shield and a display of various weapons from Polynesia, possibly.  We didn't take notes!

The small disks in this "bowl" are described as "dice" and this is described as a "woman's game."  The bowl is pounded on the ground, causing the disks to fly into the air and then land.  Black and white are counted and points awarded.  This is a North American Indian game, but I do not remember which region or tribe.

Ancient Games and Gaming Boards - National Geographic

Mystery Holes
Photograph courtesy Barbara Voorhies

Workers clean a 4,300-year-old clay floor at the Tlacuachero archaeological site in Mexico's Chiapas state (see map) in February 2009.

Mysterious semicircles of holes (center and lower right) in the floor may be dice scoreboards, archaeologist Barbara Voorhies, a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said recently. (Full story: Prehistoric Dice Boards Found—Oldest Games in Americas? New theory for mysterious 5,000-year-old semicircles in Mexico.)

If so, the circles are the oldest known evidence of games in Mesoamerica, a region that stretches from Mexico to Costa Rica.

In 1988 Voorhies found the buried floor under a mound created by the Chantuto people, foragers who lived along the coast of what's now southern Mexico between about 3,500 to 7,500 years ago.

In 2009 she found another clay floor just below the pictured floor—as well as portions of nine other semicircles. A historical account Voorhies discovered in 2009 revealed that the circles have a "striking similarity" to other Native American gaming boards.

"There's no absolute proof that my interpretation of these strange features [is right]," she said. "But it's a very strong analogy, and that's about as good as it gets for archaeology."

Voorhies received funding for her research from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)

—Christine Dell'Amore

Published December 13, 2010

More:

Evolution of the Game?
Image courtesy Barbara Voorhies

Tarahumara people of northern Mexico used a scoreboard and stick "dice" to play games (as seen in a 1907 illustration).
When Voorhies read the 1907 book Games of the North American Indians, she discovered the Tarahumara scoreboards resembled the strange Chantuto semicircles.

After that, her previous ideas about the Chantuto holes' purpose—for example that they may have been marks left by an animal pen's fenceposts—became "preposterous," she said.

Published December 13, 2010