Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, mostly women, were 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 taking a look at against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very chilly case.

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

"Believing they were taking a look at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, mentioned in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area across the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico often show a gap bashed by each side of every cranium, and had been normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists stated Wednesday the victims in the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a kind 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 wooden poles using holes bashed via them - the common observe among the many Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

Apparently, 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 stated folks should in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

"When people find one thing that may very well be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he said.

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

That same yr, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque damage site revealed proof from when tons of of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine found that in societies where social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, helping the powerful management the lower lessons and maintain them in their place.

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