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

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were looking at against the law scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of checks and evaluation to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

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

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border space across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico normally present a gap bashed through either side of every skull, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

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

While often strung on wood poles utilizing holes bashed through them - the common apply among the Aztecs and different cultures - consultants say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

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

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated folks ought to in all probability name archaeologists, not police.

"When folks discover something that could be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or directly the INAH," he mentioned.

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

That very same yr, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque smash web site revealed evidence from when tons of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research found that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor people, serving to the powerful management the decrease courses and keep them in their place.

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