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 near the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been taking a look at against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really chilly case.

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

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

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often present a hole bashed via both sides of each skull, and were often present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But consultants mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on show on a kind of trophy rack often called a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While normally strung on wooden poles utilizing holes bashed through them - the frequent follow among the many Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, somewhat than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said folks should probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, do not touch it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That same yr, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck web site revealed proof from when a whole bunch of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, serving to the powerful management the lower classes and keep them of their place.

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