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 were a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a very chilly case.

It took a decade of tests and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and History stated Wednesday.

"Believing they had been looking at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, mentioned in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often show a hole bashed by way of both sides of each skull, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a sort of trophy rack known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While usually strung on wooden poles utilizing holes bashed through them - the common observe among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

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

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

"When people discover one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify local authorities or straight the INAH," he said.

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

That very same year, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque damage web site revealed evidence from when tons of of people in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the powerful control the decrease classes and maintain them of their place.

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