Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, principally women, were 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 have been a criminal offense scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very cold case.

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

"Believing they had been looking at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, said in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often present a hole bashed via all sides of each cranium, and were often present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However experts mentioned Wednesday the victims in the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a kind of trophy rack often called 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 wood poles using holes bashed through them - the common apply among the Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, slightly than being strung on them.

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

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

"When folks find one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he stated.

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

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

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, helping the powerful management the decrease classes and preserve them in their place.

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