Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, principally ladies, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been taking a look at a criminal offense scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of tests and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History mentioned Wednesday.

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

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been tormented by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico normally present a hole bashed through both sides of every cranium, and had been normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However consultants mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed 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 normally strung on wooden poles using holes bashed by means of them - the common apply among the Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said individuals ought to most likely name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals discover one thing that might be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he said.

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

That same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque smash website revealed evidence from when hundreds of people in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies where social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, serving to the powerful control the lower courses and preserve them in their place.

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