Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly ladies, have been 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 have been taking a look at 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 checks and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they had been a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known 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 long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a gap bashed by means of all sides of every skull, and had been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists said Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a form of trophy rack referred to as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While usually strung on wooden poles utilizing holes bashed through them - the frequent practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, slightly than being strung on them.

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

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

"When individuals discover one thing that may very well be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify local authorities or instantly the INAH," he said.

In 2015, archaeologists discovered the primary trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico Metropolis's Templo Mayor Aztec break website.

That same yr, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque spoil web site revealed evidence from when a whole bunch of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine found that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, serving to the highly effective control the decrease courses and keep them in their place.

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