Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, mostly girls, 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 were a criminal offense scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of assessments and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

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

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been tormented by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually show a gap bashed by way of both sides of every skull, and had been usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But experts stated Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a type of trophy rack 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 wood poles using holes bashed through them - the widespread apply among the many Aztecs and different cultures - consultants say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

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

In mild of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated folks ought to probably call archaeologists, not police.

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

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

That very same 12 months, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque destroy site revealed evidence from when hundreds of people in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research found that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices focused poor people, helping the highly effective control the lower lessons and maintain them in their place.

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