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

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of exams and analysis 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 had been taking a look at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, said 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 long been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico usually present a gap bashed through both sides of every cranium, and were normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But consultants mentioned Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a form 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.

While normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed through them - the frequent observe among the Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

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

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

"When people discover something that might be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify local 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 wreck web site.

That same yr, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque break website revealed proof from when a whole bunch of people in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies where social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, helping the highly effective control the lower classes and hold them of their place.

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