Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, largely girls, 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 were looking at against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of tests and evaluation to find out the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and Historical past mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they had been looking at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and began analyzing 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 around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been tormented by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often show a gap bashed by all sides of every skull, and had been usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed by them - the frequent practice among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

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

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

"When people discover something that could possibly be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH," he stated.

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

That same year, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque spoil web site revealed proof from when lots of of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research found that in societies where social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, helping the powerful control the lower classes and hold them of their place.

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