Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, mostly girls, have 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 were taking a look at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of checks and analysis to find out 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 crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, said in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often present a hole bashed through each side of every skull, and have been usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims in the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a type of trophy rack often called a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas usually strung on wood poles using holes bashed by them - the common follow among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, reasonably than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated folks ought to most likely call archaeologists, not police.

"When folks discover something that might be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he stated.

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

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

A 2016 examine found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, serving to the powerful control the decrease classes and keep them in their place.

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