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

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

It seems it was a very cold case.

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

"Believing they have been looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, said in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border space across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been affected by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico usually show a gap bashed through either side of every cranium, and had been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But consultants said Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on display on a kind of trophy rack referred to as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas usually strung on picket poles using holes bashed by means of them - the common practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls might have rested atop poles, relatively than being strung on them.

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

In light of the cave expertise, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people should probably name archaeologists, not police.

"When folks discover one thing that might be in an archaeological context, do not contact it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH," he mentioned.

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

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

A 2016 research found that in societies the place social hierarchies had been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor folks, helping the highly effective control the decrease courses and keep them in their place.

Trending Information