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

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

It seems it was a very chilly case.

It took a decade of assessments and evaluation to find out the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they were taking a look at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, mentioned in a press release.

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

But experts 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 usually strung on wooden poles utilizing holes bashed by them - the common follow among the Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, somewhat than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said folks ought to most likely name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find one thing that could be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or instantly the INAH," he said.

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

That same year, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy site revealed proof from when a whole lot of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, serving to the highly effective management the decrease courses and maintain them of their place.

Trending Information