Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly girls, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been a criminal offense scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of assessments and evaluation to determine the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History stated Wednesday.

"Believing they were against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, mentioned in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border space across the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico often show a hole bashed by means of all sides of each skull, and have been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However consultants stated Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably 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 in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed by means of them - the widespread observe among the Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, reasonably than being strung on them.

Apparently, there have been extra females than males among the victims, and none of them had any tooth.

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated people should probably name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find something that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify local 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 break web site.

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

A 2016 study found that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, serving to the powerful control the lower lessons and preserve them in their place.

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