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

It turns out it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of tests and evaluation to determine the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National 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, often known as INAH, said 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 stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico normally show a gap bashed by way of both sides of every skull, and were often present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But consultants stated Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a sort of trophy rack often called 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 way of them - the frequent observe among the many Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, somewhat than being strung on them.

Curiously, there were more females than males among the many victims, and none of them had any tooth.

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned people should most likely name archaeologists, not police.

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

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

That same yr, artifacts discovered 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 examine discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor folks, serving to the powerful control the lower classes and maintain them of their place.

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