Tower of human skulls found in Mexico

A tower of human skulls beneath a Mexican city could reveal more about the ancient Aztec civilization.

The skull tower has a cylindrical structure with a diameter of about 6 m. Photo: Reuters.

Archaeologists at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) discovered more than 650 skulls and many fragments bound together with lime, forming a cylindrical tower-like structure with a diameter of 6 m near Templo Mayor, one of the main temples located in the center of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now the capital Mexico City, the Guardian reported on July 1.

The team believes the tower is part of the Huey Tzompantli, a skull structure that terrified the Spanish conquerors of Tenochtitlan when they captured the city.

Skull Tower in Mexico City. Video: Reuters.

According to historians, the skulls in the tower are the severed heads of warriors from before the Spanish conquest. This is a remnant of the Mesoamerican culture of ancient Central America.

During excavations from 2015 to the present, archaeologists have found skulls of heterogeneous age and gender. This challenges the previous hypothesis that women and children were not involved in the inter-tribal warfare.

"We initially thought these were the skulls of young male warriors, no one expected women and children to go to war. Something happened that we didn't know about and this is really new, discovered for the first time in the Huey Tzompantli structure," said Rodrigo Bolanos, a member of the research team.

The Aztecs were a group of peoples in what is now central Mexico. They dominated much of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries, with their diverse culture and rituals of human sacrifice in honor of the sun god Huitzilopochtli.

According to VNE