Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, principally girls, had been 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 had been taking a look at 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 assessments and evaluation 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 had been taking a look at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, mentioned in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed by way of each side of every cranium, and were usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

Whereas often strung on picket poles utilizing holes bashed through them - the common follow among the Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, fairly than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated individuals ought to in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

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

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

That same year, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy site revealed proof from when a whole bunch of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, serving to the powerful management the decrease courses and hold them in their place.

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