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

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they have been taking a look at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a very chilly case.

It took a decade of checks and evaluation to determine the skulls have been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and Historical past mentioned Wednesday.

"Believing they had been against the law scene, investigators collected the bones and started inspecting them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often called INAH, mentioned in an announcement.

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

However specialists stated Wednesday the victims in the cave had most likely 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 within the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

Whereas normally strung on wood poles using holes bashed by them - the widespread practice among the Aztecs and other cultures - specialists say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, fairly than being strung on them.

Interestingly, there have been extra females than males among the many victims, and none of them had any enamel.

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

"When individuals find one thing that might be in an archaeological context, do not touch it and notify native authorities or directly the INAH," he stated.

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

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

A 2016 study discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies were taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, serving to the powerful control the lower classes and keep them in their place.

Trending Information