When the Police in Mexico reported that they had found a crime scene with 150 skulls in a cave near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, and took the bones to the state capital.
It turns out it was a very cold case of one of the most gruesome crime scenes in Mexico’s history.
The border area in Chiapas near Frontera Comalapa is known for violence, crime, and human trafficking, prompting the police officers investigating the scene to believe it was a crime.
Archaeologists said that the discovery is one of the first times that such a large accumulation of severed heads has been found outside of a major pyramid or temple complex in Mexico.
On Wedneday, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said that after decade of tests and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between AD 900 and 1200.
Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly women, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago. https://t.co/QTeueGaJQZ pic.twitter.com/G9Y088XDxL
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 28, 2022
150 skulls in Mexican cave thought to be more than a ‘crime scene’ https://t.co/fM1YOLEShr pic.twitter.com/v0xl5HGbDD
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 29, 2022
More details of this gruesome discovery from The New York Post report:
When Mexican cops stumbled upon a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border a decade ago, they thought they were looking at a crime scene.
In a way, they were correct, but it has turned out to be a very cold case dating back a millennium.
It took 10 years of tests and analysis to determine the toothless craniums of men and women were from sacrificial victims killed between AD 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.
“Believing they were looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining 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 area around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually show a hole bashed through each side of every skull, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.
But experts said Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably been ritually beheaded and the skulls put on display on a kind of trophy rack known as a “tzompantli.”
AZ Central also reported the discovery:
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 took the bones to the state capital.
It turns out it was a very cold case.
It took a decade of tests and analysis 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 crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining 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 area around the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually show a hole bashed through each side of every skull, and were usually found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.
But experts said Wednesday the victims in the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a kind of trophy rack known as a “tzompantli.” Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks in the 1520s, and some Spaniards’ heads even wound up on them.
In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people should probably call archaeologists, not police.
He said in a statement:
“When people find something that could be in an archaeological context, don’t touch it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH.”
Sources: WLT, The New York Post, AZ Central
