In 2012, a citizen alert led Mexican police to a cave on the Guatemalan border where they saw a gruesome scene of sacrifice in a cave.
Some 150 skulls and other human skeletal remains lay piled up in the cave in the municipality of Frontera Comalapa in the southern state of Chiapas, according to the New York Post. At first, police thought the Chiapas cave sacrifices were some grisly modern day mass murder. The conjecture was not far-fetched, given that the Mexico-Guatemala border area is an area notorious for modern human trafficking and extreme violence.
Now, after a decade of chemical analysis and investigation of the remains collected from the sacrifice scene in the Chiapas cave, in collaboration with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), a radical revision of the theory has been led. original police. A recent INAH press release announced that research has shown that the remains of the sacrifice in the cave were actually pre-Hispanic. They are believed to date to the Early Postclassic period (900-1200 AD), according to Fox5.
The sacrifice scene in the Chiapas cave also contained the remains of a wooden altar display structure, known as an a or tzompantli, shown here, but the Chiapas skulls were mounted on posts and therefore were not pierced through the temples. (Picyrl / Public Domain)
The Sacrifices of the Caves of Chiapas: Remains of a Ritual Altar of Death
Initial suspicions by the Mexican police that the skulls were part of a recent mass murder were influenced by the fact that the skulls did not display the typical characteristics of most pre-Hispanic human sacrifices in Mexico, where the skulls were pierced by both sides. to mount them on a display rack.
However, experts who examined the sacrificial skulls in the cave and what was found around them concluded that the victims had been ritually decapitated. The INAH press release indicates that scientists believe that it is an ancient funerary context and that indeed, in the Comalapa cave there was a sacrificial altar or tzompantli, a kind of trophy display. Accounts by Spanish conquistadors in the 1520s mention seeing such a tzompantli.
Physical anthropologist Javier Montes de Paz, a researcher at the INAH Chiapas Center, said in the INAH press release that there are several factors that support this hypothesis. One is that while some femur, tibia and radius bones have been found along with the skulls, not a single complete skeleton has been identified so far. This lends weight to a context of ritual beheading. “We still do not have the exact calculation of how many there are, since some are very fragmented, but so far we can speak of approximately 150 skulls.”
The scientists also point to the record of the Chiapas State Attorney General’s Office from 2012 that mentions traces of aligned wooden sticks. The skulls of human sacrificial victims in Aztec and other indigenous cultures were generally hung from wooden posts using holes hammered into their temporal and parietal bones. However, experts believe that the skulls in the caves could have rested on posts, which would explain the absence of perforations. “Many of these structures were made of wood, a material that disappeared over time and could have collapsed all the skulls,” Montes de Paz said in the INAH press release.
A closeup of one of the Chiapas cave sacrifice victims, who were mostly female for some reason. (YouTube screenshot / USA Today)
All the Victims Had No Teeth And Were Mostly Female!
The INAH said that skulls belonged mostly to women, although they didn’t comment on why this was so. “We have recognized the skeletal remains of three infants, but most of the bones are from adults and, until now, they are more from women than from men.”
Interestingly, the skulls were almost all toothless. Although experts have yet to establish whether the teeth were extracted while alive or post mortem, precedents of this type have been recorded in the Chiapas region. In the 1980s, 124 toothless skulls, found in a cave in the municipality of La Trinitaria, were investigated by the INAH. In 1993, Mexican and French explorers discovered five skulls placed on a wooden grid in another cave in the municipality of Ocozocoautla. These also lacked teeth.
Montes de Paz called on people to respect their archaeological heritage and immediately alert local authorities or the INAH when they come across scenes that show evidence of a remote past. Unsupervised visits by locals can affect the archaeological heritage, sometimes irreversibly. “The call is that when people locate a context that is likely to be archaeological, they avoid intervening and notify local authorities or INAH directly,” he said in the INAH press release.
The INAH intends to continue exploring the scene of the sacrifice in the Comalapa cave. Maybe some clues can be found for the puzzle of the toothless skulls. The answers to the mystery of why more women than men were sacrificed may also be forthcoming. Was it a reflection of power relations in pre-Hispanic Chiapas society? Or were female human sacrifices more sacred than male ones?
Top image: The sacrifice scene in the Chiapas cave, where around 150 toothless skulls were found, as discovered in 2012. By Sahir Pandey
