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

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

It turns out it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of assessments and analysis to find out the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they were looking at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, stated 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 stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally present a hole bashed via each side of every skull, and had been often present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

Whereas normally strung on wooden poles utilizing holes bashed by them - the widespread practice among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, fairly than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned people ought to most likely name archaeologists, not police.

"When folks discover something that could be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he stated.

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

That same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy site revealed evidence from when a whole bunch of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, helping the highly effective control the lower classes and hold them of their place.

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