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

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they were looking at a criminal offense 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 determine the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past stated Wednesday.

"Believing they have been a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, stated in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed via each side of every cranium, and have been usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But experts said Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a sort of trophy rack known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While normally strung on picket poles using holes bashed through them - the widespread apply among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, somewhat than being strung on them.

Interestingly, there have been extra 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 stated people ought to in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

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

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

That very same year, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque break site revealed proof from when a whole bunch 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 shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the powerful management the lower classes and maintain them of their place.

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