Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, principally ladies, have been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

When Mexican police found 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 very chilly case.

It took a decade of exams and analysis to determine 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 had been against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and began analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, mentioned 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 tormented by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico often show a gap bashed through each side of each skull, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However consultants mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely 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 a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas usually strung on picket poles using holes bashed through them - the frequent practice among the many Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, reasonably than being strung on them.

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

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

"When folks discover one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or instantly the INAH," he mentioned.

In 2015, archaeologists discovered the primary trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico Metropolis's Templo Mayor Aztec damage web site.

That very same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque damage site revealed evidence from when tons of of people 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 shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, helping the highly effective control the decrease courses and hold them of their place.

Trending News