By Elizabeth Leafloor | RedIceCreations.com

A grisly discovery has been unearthed in Mexico. A trove of skulls, dating back to between A.D. 600 and 850, have been found without their bodies in what archaeologists suggest was a mass human sacrifice.

From LiveScience.com:

The find, described in the January issue of the journal Latin American Antiquity, was located in an otherwise empty field that once held a vast lake, but was miles from the nearest major city of the day, said study co-author Christopher Morehart, an archaeologist at Georgia State University.

"It’s absolutely remarkable to think about this little nothing on the landscape having potentially evidence of the largest mass human sacrifice in ancient Meso-America," Morehart said.

Morehart and his colleagues were using satellite imagery to map ancient canals, irrigation channels and lakes that used to surround the kingdom of Teotihuacan (home to the Pyramid of the Sun), about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Mexico City. The vast ancient kingdom flourished from around A.D 200 to 650, though who built it remains a mystery.

The findings shake up existing notions of the culture of the day, because the site is not associated with Teotihuacan or other regional powers, said Destiny Crider, an archaeologist at Luther College in Iowa, who was not involved in the study.

Human sacrifice was practiced throughout the region, both at Teotihuacan and in the later Aztec Empire, but most of those rituals happened at great pyramids within cities and were tied to state powers.

An artifact depicting Tlaloc, a Pre-Columbian water god, was found at the dig site at Lake Xaltocan, Mexico.

Dig site in Mexico where a trove of decapitated skulls were reportedly found buried.