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

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 crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of assessments and analysis to determine the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History stated Wednesday.

"Believing they were taking a look at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, said in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico usually present a hole bashed through all sides of each cranium, and have been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a kind 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 often strung on wood poles using holes bashed through them - the common apply among the Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, rather 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 light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated people ought to in all probability name archaeologists, not police.

"When people find one thing that could be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify local authorities or instantly the INAH," he stated.

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

That very same 12 months, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin web site revealed proof from when a whole bunch of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, helping the highly effective management the decrease lessons and preserve them of their place.

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