Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly women, have been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

When Mexican police discovered 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 turns out it was a very cold case.

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

"Believing they have been a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, said in a statement.

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

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims in the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a form of trophy rack often known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed by means of them - the common observe among the Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

Apparently, there have been more females than males among the victims, and none of them had any teeth.

In mild of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated individuals should most likely call archaeologists, not police.

"When folks find something that could be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH," he said.

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

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

A 2016 examine found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, helping the powerful control the lower courses and keep them in their place.

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