Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, principally ladies, were 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 were against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very cold 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 National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they have been a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, stated in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico often show a hole bashed via all sides of every skull, and have been usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However experts mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a sort of trophy rack known 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 utilizing holes bashed by way of them - the common apply among the many Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, fairly than being strung on them.

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

In gentle of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned folks ought to most likely call archaeologists, not police.

"When folks find one thing that could possibly 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 Metropolis's Templo Mayor Aztec ruin web site.

That very same year, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck web site revealed proof from when a whole lot of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, helping the powerful control the decrease courses and preserve them in their place.

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