Police found 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 found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of assessments and evaluation to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

"Believing they have been taking a look at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, stated in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally show a hole bashed by way of both sides of every cranium, and had been normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However specialists stated Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a type of trophy rack often 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 wooden poles utilizing holes bashed by way of them - the widespread follow among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

Apparently, there were 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 folks should in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

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

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

That same year, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck website revealed proof from when a whole lot of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, serving to the powerful management the lower classes and hold them in their place.

Trending Information