Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn by Arthur MacGregor

Author:Arthur MacGregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317602019
Publisher: Routledge

Dice (Figure 71a–e)

The earliest known British dice are from Iron Age contexts and are parallelepiped rather than cubical (Figure 71a). At least ten pre-Roman sites have produced dice of this type (see D.V. Clarke 1970, for references), while the latest example in the south, from Coygan Camp, Dyfed, may be dated to the second century AD (Wainwright 1967). Clarke suggests that the later absence of parallelepiped dice from the highly Romanised south may be explained by the wholesale adoption there of the Roman six-sided cubical dice, along with other facets of Roman material culture. In those regions lying beyond the limits of intense imperial influence, however, the type lingered on for several centuries and, indeed, may not have even gained currency in the first instance until around the second century AD, by which time it was already disappearing from the south.

In Scotland parallelepiped dice occur on a number of broch and wheelhouse sites with lengthy post-Roman occupation, although any association with the later rather than the earlier phases is in every instance probable rather than demonstrable. In Ireland, on the other hand, several examples from Ballinderry, Offaly (Hencken 1942) and Lagore, Meath (Hencken 1950) clearly do belong to the post-Roman period, some of them dating from perhaps as late as the ninth century.

The choice of raw materials used in the manufacture of parallelepiped bone dice varies to some extent from that noted below for the cubical variety: the majority are made from the shafts of small long bones, comparable with the metapodials of sheep, and indeed their characteristically elongated shape may be seen as resulting from this repeated selection. A corollary of this choice is that the ends are usually open and hence the values are normally restricted to the four elongated sides, the numbers 1 and 2 usually being omitted. Antler is also used on occasion, however, as well as entire small bones, but the solid ends of even these dice do not normally carry values.

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