Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, principally ladies, had been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very chilly case.

It took a decade of assessments and evaluation to determine the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

"Believing they had been a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, stated 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 long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually show a hole bashed by way of either side of each cranium, and had been normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But consultants said Wednesday the victims in 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 some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While often strung on picket poles using holes bashed by way of them - the widespread follow among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated individuals should in all probability name archaeologists, not police.

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

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

That same yr, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin site revealed evidence from when a whole bunch of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor folks, serving to the powerful control the decrease classes and maintain them of their place.

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