Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, principally women, have been 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 looking at against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really cold case.

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

"Believing they were against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, mentioned in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area across 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 hole bashed by way of either side of each cranium, and had been normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But experts said Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a sort of trophy rack often known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas normally strung on wood poles utilizing holes bashed by means of them - the widespread practice among the many Aztecs and different cultures - consultants say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

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

In gentle of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned individuals ought to in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

"When folks find something that could be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify local authorities or straight the INAH," he stated.

In 2015, archaeologists found the primary trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico City's Templo Mayor Aztec break web site.

That very same yr, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque damage web site revealed proof from when hundreds of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine found that in societies where social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, serving to the highly effective control the lower classes and hold them of their place.

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