Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out 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 close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been taking a look at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of assessments and evaluation to find out the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

"Believing they were a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, said in a statement.

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

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on show on a kind of trophy rack generally 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 wooden poles using holes bashed by means of them - the frequent follow among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, somewhat than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned folks should most likely name archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals discover something that might be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH," he stated.

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

That very same year, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque damage website revealed evidence from when hundreds of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy had been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study found that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor folks, serving to the powerful control the decrease classes and preserve them in their place.

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