Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, largely girls, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

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

It seems it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of tests 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 mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they had been a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, said in an announcement.

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

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims in the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a sort of trophy rack referred to as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While usually strung on picket poles using holes bashed by them - the common practice among the Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people ought to probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals discover one thing that could be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify local 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 destroy site.

That very same yr, artifacts discovered at the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy website revealed proof from when lots of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research discovered that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor folks, helping the highly effective control the lower classes and keep them of their place.

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