Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, principally women, had been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been taking a look at 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 checks and analysis to determine the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they were looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, said in a press release.

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

But consultants said Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a kind of trophy rack often called a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas usually strung on wood poles utilizing holes bashed through them - the frequent apply among the many Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

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

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

"When individuals discover one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he said.

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

That same year, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque break web site revealed proof from when lots of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the powerful management the decrease lessons and preserve them in their place.

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