Mexico 'crime scene' skulls turn out to be from AD 900

<p> Mexico City, Apr 28 (AP): 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.</p><p> It turns out it was a very cold case.</p><p> 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.</p><p> “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.</p><p> 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.</p><p> 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.</p><p> While usually strung on wooden poles using holes bashed through them — the common practice among the Aztecs and other cultures — experts say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.</p><p> Interestingly, there were more females than males among the victims, and none of them had any teeth.</p><p> In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people should probably call archaeologists, not police.</p><p> “When people find something that could be in an archaeological context, don't touch it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH,” he said. (AP) RDK</p><p><i>(This story is published as part of the auto-generated syndicate wire feed. No editing has been done in the headline or the body by ABP Live.)</i></p>

 ALL Credit of this post going to https://news.abplive.com