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

It seems it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of tests and analysis to find out the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and History mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they have been looking at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and began analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, stated in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area across the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico usually present a gap bashed via all sides of each cranium, and had been usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But experts said Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a sort of trophy rack often known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas often strung on picket poles utilizing holes bashed by them - the common practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people ought to probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find something that might be in an archaeological context, don't 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 wreck site.

That same year, artifacts found at 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 research found that in societies where social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, helping the powerful control the decrease lessons and maintain them of their place.

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