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.

Experts say the victims in the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on display on a kind of trophy rack.

Highlights

Police found about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border in 2012.
It took a decade of tests and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D.
900 and 1200.
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.
Experts say 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 wound up on them.