The Aztecs revered the Toltecs as master artisans; archaeologists suspect a legend
To the Aztecs, the Toltecs of Tula were the model of civilisation, and their very name came to mean artisan. Aztec chronicles even listed Toltec kings. Yet many scholars now treat that empire as partly myth, and a 2003 study argued Tula was more a regional kingdom than a conquering power.
Tula, in the modern Mexican state of Hidalgo, flourished from about 950 to 1150 AD. Its people probably blended Nonoalca migrants from the southern Gulf Coast, who formed the majority, with settled Chichimeca from the north. When Teotihuacan declined around 650 AD, the Coyotlatelco culture took over the region and founded Tula Chico, a gridded town of three to six square kilometres with several ball courts and pyramids. After it burned, a new centre, Tula Grande, rose 1.5 kilometres to the south.
At its peak Tula Grande may have held as many as 60,000 people across 16 square kilometres. Stone Atlantean warriors crown Pyramid B, and colonnaded halls around the plaza echo buildings in ancestral cities, probably serving trade and diplomacy. One survey collected about 16,000 obsidian pieces in the urban core and more than 25,000 in outlying homes, pointing to a specialised industry that may have inherited Teotihuacan's role as distributor.
The strange likeness between Tula and the Maya city of Chichen Itza has fuelled more than a century of argument. Desire Charnay, the first archaeologist at Tula, imagined a Toltec army under Kukulcan seizing Chichen Itza; others propose that Chichen Itza colonised Tula, or that ties were loose. Both cities drew most of their obsidian from the same two sources. Michael E. Smith and Lisa Montiel, comparing Tula with Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, judged its reach slight.
The historicist school, from nineteenth-century writers to Nigel Davies and H. B. Nicholson, read Aztec accounts as real history while trying to separate the god Quetzalcoatl from a ruler bearing that name. Daniel Garrison Brinton had already blamed human nostalgia for the golden-age image. Since the 1990s his sceptical line has prevailed: Tollan, place of reeds, could mean any great city, and Toltec could signal sophistication rather than a people. The friar Diego Duran even wondered whether their teacher Topiltzin was Thomas the Apostle.
Source: Toltec
