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

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really cold case.

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

"Believing they were a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, mentioned 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 lengthy been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually show a hole bashed by either side of every skull, and were normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims in the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on show on a kind of trophy rack known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas normally strung on wood poles utilizing holes bashed by them - the frequent practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

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

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

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

In 2015, archaeologists found the principle trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico Metropolis's Templo Mayor Aztec spoil site.

That same year, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque smash web site revealed evidence from when a whole lot of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the powerful management the decrease lessons and preserve them in their place.

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