Unsurprisingly, the priests rigged the game by making sure the fire would start. The sticks used to tally the weeks of the calendar were bundled up and tossed as part of the ritual.
As part of the process of correcting their calendar for things like leap years, priests engaged in a “game of chance” to see if they could summon fire in the body of a sacrificial victim. Darlington believed that many American dice games had origins in sacred Aztec rituals. The typical die was curved on one side and flatter on the other. Six-sided dice came into use later and may have been introduced by Europeans.Īrchaeologist H.S. According to archaeologists Warren DeBoer and Barbara Voorhies, native people throughout North America and Mesoamerica constructed dice of a wide variety of materials, such as fruit pits, shells, or teeth, or even split reeds or sticks. In the pre-colonial Americas, dice were typically just two-sided, painted on each side. How pre-Renaissance people viewed their games’ fairness is difficult to say, but dice themselves have a long and fascinating history. Dice in particular have drawn attention from scholars, and a recent study of dice reveals that truly balanced dice did not really exist until the Renaissance. Gambling is one of humankind’s oldest activities. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.
