Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, largely women, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

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

It seems it was a very cold case.

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

"Believing they have been against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, mentioned in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often show a hole bashed through both sides of every skull, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However consultants stated Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a form of trophy rack often known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While normally strung on wood poles utilizing holes bashed by way of them - the frequent follow among the many Aztecs and different cultures - consultants say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, fairly than being strung on them.

Curiously, there were more females than males among the victims, and none of them had any teeth.

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said folks should in all probability name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals find something that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH," he stated.

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

That same yr, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque smash web site revealed proof from when a whole lot of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, serving to the powerful control the lower classes and preserve them in their place.

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