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

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been 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 evaluation to find out the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they have been taking a look at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, said in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed through all sides of each skull, and had been usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However experts said Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a sort of trophy rack often called a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas often strung on wooden poles using holes bashed via them - the common apply among the many Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

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

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

"When folks find something that might be in an archaeological context, do not touch it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That very same 12 months, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy website revealed evidence from when hundreds of people in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor folks, helping the highly effective management the lower classes and maintain them of their place.

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