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

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they were a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of exams and evaluation to find out the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past stated Wednesday.

"Believing they were looking at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, mentioned in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally present a hole bashed through all sides of every cranium, and had been often present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While usually strung on wood poles using holes bashed through them - the common apply among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated individuals should in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

"When folks find something that could possibly be in an archaeological context, do not touch it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That very same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin website revealed proof from when hundreds of people 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 focused poor folks, helping the powerful management the lower courses and hold them in their place.

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