Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, mostly women, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been taking a look at against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of exams 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 mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they have been taking a look at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, said in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed by means of either side of each cranium, and had been usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However consultants said Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on show on a form of trophy rack referred to 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 picket poles using holes bashed by means of them - the common follow among the many Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said folks should in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That very same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck site revealed evidence from when hundreds of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, helping the highly effective control the lower lessons and maintain them in their place.

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