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

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been 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 exams and analysis to find out the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

"Believing they were taking a look at against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, said in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico normally present a hole bashed via each side of each skull, and were normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on show on a kind of trophy rack known as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas normally strung on picket poles utilizing holes bashed via them - the common apply among the many Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

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

In gentle of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated folks ought to in all probability call archaeologists, not police.

"When people discover one thing that might be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify native authorities or straight the INAH," he said.

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

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

A 2016 research discovered that in societies where social hierarchies have been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, serving to the highly effective management the decrease lessons and maintain them in their place.

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