Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, principally women, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of exams and analysis to determine the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

"Believing they had been looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, mentioned in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often present a gap bashed by either side of each cranium, and had been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However consultants mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a kind of trophy rack known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While normally strung on picket poles using holes bashed by them - the common practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

Curiously, there were more females than males among the many victims, and none of them had any enamel.

In gentle of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned people should most likely name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals discover one thing that might be in an archaeological context, do not touch it and notify native authorities or instantly the INAH," he stated.

In 2015, archaeologists found the principle trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico City's Templo Mayor Aztec wreck website.

That same 12 months, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin web site revealed proof from when lots of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor folks, serving to the highly effective control the decrease lessons and preserve them in their place.

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