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

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

It turns out it was a very cold case.

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

"Believing they had been looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, said in an announcement.

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

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

Whereas usually strung on wood poles utilizing holes bashed by means of them - the frequent apply among the many Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, slightly than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said folks ought to in all probability name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find one thing that could be in an archaeological context, don't 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 very same year, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy site revealed evidence from when tons of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study discovered that in societies where social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor folks, helping the powerful control the lower classes and hold them in their place.

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