Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, largely 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 have been looking at a criminal offense scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of checks and analysis to find out the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they had been taking a look at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, mentioned in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often show a gap bashed via each side of each cranium, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

Whereas often strung on wood poles using holes bashed by way of them - the frequent observe among the Aztecs and different cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

Curiously, there were extra 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 mentioned folks ought to probably name archaeologists, not police.

"When people discover one thing that could possibly be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he said.

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

That same yr, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy website revealed evidence from when a whole bunch of people in a Spanish-led convoy were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study found that in societies the place social hierarchies were taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, serving to the highly effective management the decrease classes and maintain them in their place.

Trending News