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

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really cold case.

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

"Believing they had been looking at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting 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 across the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico normally present a gap bashed by both sides of each cranium, and have been usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

Whereas often strung on wooden poles using holes bashed via them - the frequent observe among the Aztecs and different cultures - consultants say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, reasonably than being strung on them.

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

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

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

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

That same year, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck website revealed evidence from when a whole bunch 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 shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, serving to the highly effective control the decrease classes and hold them of their place.

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