Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, largely girls, have been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

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

It turns out it was a really chilly case.

It took a decade of exams 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 were looking at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, said in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been stricken by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico usually present a gap bashed by way of both sides of each cranium, and were normally found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However specialists stated Wednesday the victims in the cave had in all probability been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a type of trophy rack known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas often strung on wood poles using holes bashed by means of them - the frequent practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - experts say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, quite than being strung on them.

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

In gentle of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned people ought to most likely name archaeologists, not police.

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

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

That very same yr, artifacts discovered on the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck site revealed proof from when a whole lot of people in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 examine discovered that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, serving to the powerful control the lower classes and hold them of their place.

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