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

It turns out it was a very chilly case.

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

"Believing they had been looking at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, mentioned 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 skull piles in Mexico usually show a hole bashed by means of all sides of each skull, and had been usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a kind 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.

While normally strung on picket poles utilizing holes bashed by them - the frequent practice among the Aztecs and different cultures - consultants say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, reasonably than being strung on them.

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

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated individuals should probably name archaeologists, not police.

"When folks find one thing that might be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify native authorities or directly the INAH," he said.

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

That same year, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy site revealed evidence from when hundreds of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, serving to the powerful control the lower courses and keep them in their place.

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