Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly women, 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 looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a very chilly case.

It took a decade of assessments and evaluation to find out the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History stated Wednesday.

"Believing they had been taking a look at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, said in a press release.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area across 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 often show a gap bashed by way of each side of each cranium, and were often found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However experts stated Wednesday the victims in 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 in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed through them - the common apply among the many Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, fairly than being strung on them.

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

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated folks should probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When people find one thing that might be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH," he said.

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

That same 12 months, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque spoil site revealed evidence from when tons of of people in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research found that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, helping the powerful management the decrease courses and keep them of their place.

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