Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, mostly women, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they were against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very 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 History said Wednesday.

"Believing they had been a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, stated 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 long been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed by way of each side of each cranium, and had been often found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But experts said Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a sort of trophy rack referred to as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas often strung on wooden poles using holes bashed through them - the common follow among the Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

Apparently, there were extra females than males among the many victims, and none of them had any teeth.

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

"When individuals find something that may very well be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That very same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque spoil site revealed proof from when hundreds 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 shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, serving to the powerful management the lower classes and keep them of their place.

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