Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, largely girls, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were taking a look at a crime 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 find out the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

"Believing they were a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, stated in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been tormented by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico usually present a gap bashed by either side of each cranium, and were normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists stated Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a form 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.

Whereas usually strung on picket poles utilizing holes bashed by them - the frequent follow among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

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

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

"When people find something that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he mentioned.

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

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

A 2016 research discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the powerful management the lower classes and hold them of their place.

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