Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, largely women, 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 had been against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of exams and evaluation to find out the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History stated Wednesday.

"Believing they have been a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, stated in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space 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 often show a gap bashed through either side of every cranium, and had been usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

Whereas often strung on wood poles using holes bashed through them - the common practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, slightly than being strung on them.

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

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

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

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

That very same yr, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque break web site revealed proof from when a whole bunch of people in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, serving to the highly effective management the lower lessons and hold them of their place.

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