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

It seems it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of checks and evaluation to find out the skulls have 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 taking a look at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, stated in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been tormented by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed via each side of each skull, and were normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However consultants said Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a type of trophy rack known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas often strung on wood poles using holes bashed by way of them - the common follow among the Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

Interestingly, there were 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 people ought to most likely call archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find something that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he mentioned.

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

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

A 2016 study found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, helping the highly effective management the decrease lessons and preserve them in their place.

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