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

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were looking at against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of assessments and evaluation to find out the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they were a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, mentioned 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 lengthy been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed through both sides of each cranium, and were usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While normally strung on picket poles utilizing holes bashed by way of them - the common follow among the Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

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

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

"When folks find one thing that may very well be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he said.

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

That same year, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque break web site revealed evidence from when a whole bunch of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study discovered that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, serving to the powerful control the decrease classes and keep them of their place.

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