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

It seems it was a very cold case.

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

"Believing they have been a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, said in a press release.

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

But experts said Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a sort of trophy rack referred to as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While often strung on wooden poles using holes bashed by them - the frequent apply among the Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls could 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 gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said individuals should in all probability name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find one thing that could be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or instantly the INAH," he stated.

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

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

A 2016 study discovered that in societies where social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, helping the powerful control the lower courses and keep them of their place.

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