The story most people tell about tribal casinos is neat and convenient. That it is a modern industry, seized as an economic opportunity.

Robert J. Madden’s research points somewhere much older.

“We’re talking about a very deep cultural tradition,” he tells me, “probably one of the oldest continuous cultural practices in North America.”

Not decades old. Not centuries old. If his research is right, Native American gambling traditions stretch back 12,000 years, forming an unbroken line from Ice Age campsites to present-day casino floors. It lands at a moment when the legal structure governing tribal gaming is being tested in ways its authors never anticipated.

Tracing the origins of tribal gambling and Native American dice games

Madden, who is the author behind “Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance and Gambling” approached the problem with the instincts of a litigator. A former trial attorney turned archaeologist, evidence had to be consistent across time and strong enough to support inference without guesswork.

“You don’t have to make any huge leaps,” he says. “You can just kind of step, step, step… back into the past and follow it all the way back.”

Starting with well-documented historic Native dice, catalogued in detail by early ethnographers such as Stewart Culin, Madden created a kind of diagnostic checklist. If ancient artifacts matched those characteristics, they could reasonably be identified as dice used in games of chance. Applying that framework across the archaeological record, he identified hundreds of sites where the same forms appeared again and again, stretching further back in time than anyone had previously demonstrated.

The deeper he looked, the more ...