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

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

It seems it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of exams and analysis to find out the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they were looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, stated in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area across the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often present a gap bashed through each side of each cranium, and have been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed by them - the common apply among the Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

Curiously, there have been more females than males among the victims, and none of them had any teeth.

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated folks ought to in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

"When people discover something that might be in an archaeological context, do not touch 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 damage website.

That same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque break web site revealed proof from when a whole lot of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine found that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, helping the powerful control the lower courses and maintain them of their place.

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