ON LOSING ONE’S HEART

In his thoughtful review of “A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya” (Dec. 23), reviewer Victor Perera says that some vignettes “suffer from insufficient underpinning.” In particular, he asks: “How do we know that captives sacrificed at Chichen Itza died a gentle death ‘because no one ever made a sound when his heart was cut out’ ?”

All of our attempts to bring the Maya world to life through dramatic interludes are extensively annotated with end notes, and the Chichen Itza dance-sacrifice scene has four notes. We did not annotate the matter of quiet heart sacrifice, so here’s a note for Mr. Perera and your readers:

In a chapter in “Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica,” heart surgeon Francis Robicsek and his colleague Donald Hales make a persuasive case on the basis of available depictions that the prevalent procedure for Classic Maya heart extraction was bilateral transverse thoracotomy. This cut, right across the chest, dividing the sternum, would have resulted in the immediate collapse of the lungs and rapid unconsciousness. The individual might live another five or six minutes after the incision. The still-beating heart would have been conveniently accessible for removal and offering.

This procedure would produce the characteristic wedge-shaped chest wound in an outstretched victim, as seen, for example, in the mural painting over the doorway in the Upper Temple of the Jaguars at Chichen Itza. The victim of this procedure would not be able to cry out following the collapse of the lungs and before the extraction of the heart.

Munro Edmonson, in a chapter in the same book, observes that the procedure of heart extraction is called “painless death” in the “Chilam Balam of Tizimin,” a native Yucatecan Maya chronicle. He supposes that victims were perhaps anesthetized . . .

We designed our vignettes to be entertaining, to hook our readers on Maya history, but we raised them on foundations of fact and reasonable inference. We hope our readers enjoy the notes as much as the main text of our book.

DAVID FREIDEL & LINDA SCHELE, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, DALLAS