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

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were taking a look at 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 tests and analysis to find out the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they were a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, mentioned in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space around the city 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 gap bashed by means of both sides of every cranium, and were normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

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

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

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said folks ought to probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When people find one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That very same yr, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck web site revealed evidence from when hundreds of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study discovered that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, helping the highly effective management the lower classes and hold them in their place.

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