Robert Madden

Summer 2024

How Past Cultures Rolled the Dice

Master’s student Robert Madden studies and documents prehistoric, Indigenous North American games of chance, dice, and gambling. As part of that work, Madden visited archival repositories at the Smithsonian and the University of Wyoming during Summer 2024 to examine and photograph 12,000-year-old artifacts of gaming, such as dice made from animal bones. Museum collections include materials from several important regional archaeological areas, including the Lindenmeier site in northern Colorado, located within the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area and site of the 2021 Archaeology Field School, and the Agate Basin site in Wyoming.

Madden, who uses field and collections materials and high-resolution photography in his work, is completing a paper for publication on Indigenous games and gambling. He previously won the Graduate Student Paper Competition at the 2022 Plains Anthropological Society annual conference for his research on the topic. Madden works with Prof. Jason LaBelle and the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology.