Photo: pixabay When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were looking at a crime scene and carrying the bones to the state capital. It turned out to be a very cold case. It took a decade of testing and analysis to determine that the skulls were victims of sacrifices killed between 900 and 1200 AD, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said on Wednesday. “Believing they were looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and began examining them at Tuxtla Gutierrez,” the state-run institute, known as INAH, said in a statement. The police in 2012 were not stupid. The border area around the town of Frontera Comalapa in the southern state of Chiapas has long been plagued by violence and migrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skulls in Mexico usually show a hole that opens on each side of each skull and was usually found in ritual squares, not caves. However, experts said on Wednesday that the victims in the cave had probably been beheaded ritualistically and the skulls had been exposed to a kind of trophy shelf known as “jobandli”. The Spanish conquerors wrote that they saw such shelves in the 1520s and the heads of some Spaniards were even wrapped around them. Although usually tied to wooden poles using holes drilled through them – a common practice among Aztecs and other cultures – experts say cave skulls may have rested on top of poles instead of laces. Interestingly, there were more females than males among the victims and none of them had teeth. In the light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people should probably call archaeologists, not police. “When people find something that could be in an archeological context, do not touch it and inform the local authorities or INAH directly,” he said.
