Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, principally girls, have been 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 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 checks and evaluation to determine the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and Historical past stated Wednesday.

"Believing they have been looking at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, mentioned 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 long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico often present a hole bashed through all sides of each cranium, and have been usually present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a kind of trophy rack generally known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas normally strung on picket poles utilizing holes bashed through them - the frequent practice among the many Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned people should probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When folks discover one thing that could be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he said.

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

That same year, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque damage site revealed evidence from when a whole lot of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study found that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the highly effective management the lower lessons and maintain them of their place.

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