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 near the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been looking 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 tests and evaluation to find out the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they have been looking at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, stated 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 stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico often present a gap bashed through both sides of each cranium, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But experts said Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably 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 a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While normally strung on wooden poles using holes bashed through them - the common follow among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, moderately than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated folks should probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When people find something that might be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify local authorities or straight the INAH," he stated.

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

That same yr, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque smash website revealed proof from when tons of 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 individuals, helping the highly effective control the lower courses and preserve them in their place.

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