Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, principally women, had been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a very chilly case.

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

"Believing they were taking a look at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, mentioned in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico often show a hole bashed by means of either side of each cranium, and had been usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists said Wednesday the victims in the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a kind of trophy rack often called 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 picket poles utilizing holes bashed via them - the common practice among the Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, fairly than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated people should in all probability name archaeologists, not police.

"When folks discover something that may very well be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or directly the INAH," he mentioned.

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

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

A 2016 study discovered that in societies where social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, serving to the highly effective control the lower classes and maintain them in their place.

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