Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly ladies, had been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.

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

It seems it was a very chilly case.

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

"Believing they had been taking a look at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, generally known as INAH, said in a statement.

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

But experts mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a kind of trophy rack often 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 widespread observe among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said individuals should probably name archaeologists, not police.

"When people find one thing that could be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify native authorities or immediately the INAH," he said.

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

That very same yr, artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque damage site revealed evidence from when lots of of people in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study discovered that in societies where social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, helping the highly effective management the decrease classes and keep them of their place.

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