Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly women, had been 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 had been looking 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 tests and evaluation to find out the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they were taking a look at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, said in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a gap bashed through all sides of every cranium, and had been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed through them - the widespread follow among the many Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people should probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals discover one thing that could be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or instantly 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 same year, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin website revealed proof from when lots of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, helping the highly effective management the decrease lessons and preserve them of their place.

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