And in contrast with modern dice, they weren’t always exactly cubes.
It’s evident that dice arrived in the Netherlands with the Romans in the first few centuries after the death of Christ. They haven’t always been well documented, however Eerkens measured and photographed almost twice as many dice as he and his coauthor ended up being able use in this study, bypassing those without clear dates. What’s more, the shifts in dice’s appearance may reflect people’s changing sense of what exactly is behind a roll-fate, or probability.ĭice have been found all over Europe, says Jelmer Eerkens, an archaeologist at the University of California at Davis, who led the study. But a new study of more than 100 examples from the last 2,000 years or so unearthed in the Netherlands shows that they have not always looked exactly the way they do now. Dice, in their standard six-sided form, seem like the simplest kind of device-almost a classic embodiment of chance.
