Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, largely 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 near the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of tests 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 said Wednesday.

"Believing they have been looking at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, stated in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border space across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually present a hole bashed via both sides of every skull, and had been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While usually strung on picket poles using holes bashed by way of them - the common observe among the many Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

Interestingly, there have been more females than males among the victims, and none of them had any teeth.

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

"When folks discover one thing that might be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or directly the INAH," he stated.

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

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

A 2016 research found that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, helping the highly effective management the lower lessons and keep them in their place.

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