Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, largely girls, 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 had been a criminal offense scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of assessments and analysis to determine the skulls were 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 inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, said in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area across the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often present a gap bashed by all sides of every cranium, and had been often found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While usually strung on wood poles using holes bashed by them - the frequent follow among the many Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

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

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

"When individuals find one thing that may very well be in an archaeological context, do not touch it and notify local authorities or straight the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That same yr, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy website revealed evidence from when tons of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the powerful management the lower lessons and preserve them in their place.

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