 The Atlantes – columns in the form of Toltec warriors in Tula. The word Toltec in Mesoamerican studies has been used in different ways by different scholars to refer to actual populations and polities of pre-Columbian central Mexico or to the mythical ancestors mentioned in the mythical/historical narratives of the Aztecs. It is an ongoing debate whether the Toltecs can be understood to have formed an actual ethnic group at any point in Mesoamerican history or if they are mostly or only a product of Aztec myth. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ...
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Tula is a town of about 10,000 in Hidalgo State, central Mexico, some 57 miles to the north north-west of Mexico City. ...
Image File history File links Size of this preview: 513 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1440 × 1684 pixel, file size: 345 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) A rather expressive vessel, done in Toltec style. ...
Image File history File links Size of this preview: 513 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1440 × 1684 pixel, file size: 345 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) A rather expressive vessel, done in Toltec style. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
This article is about the culture area. ...
The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the Americas continent. ...
The Aztecs is a term used for certain Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples of Mexico. ...
The scholars who have understood the Toltecs to have been an actual ethnic group often connect them to the archeological site of Tula, Hidalgo which is then supposed to have been the Tollan of Aztec myth.[1] This tradition assumes the "Toltec empire" to have dominated much of central Mexico between the 10th and 12th century AD. Other Mexican cities such as Teotihuacán[2] have also been proposed to have been the historical Tollan "Place of Reeds", the city from which the name Tolteca "inhabitant of Tollan" is derived in the Nahuatl language. The term Toltec has also been associated with the arrival of certain Central Mexican cultural traits into the Mayan sphere of dominance that took place in the late classic and early postclassic periods, and the Postclassic Mayan civilizations of Chichén Itzá, Mayapán and the Guatemalan highlands have been referred to as "toltecized" or "mexicanized" Mayas. For example the striking similarities between the city of Tula, Hidalgo and Chichen Itza have often been cited as direct evidence for Toltec dominance of the Postclassic Maya. Tula is a town of about 10,000 in Hidalgo State, central Mexico, some 57 miles to the north north-west of Mexico City. ...
Tollan or Tolan or Tolán is the name used for the capital city of two empires of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica; first for Teotihuacan, and later for the Toltec capital of Tula. ...
As a means of recording the passage of time, the 10th century was that century which lasted from 901 to 1000. ...
(11th century - 12th century - 13th century - other centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 12th century was that century which lasted from 1101 to 1200. ...
Teotihuacán[1] was, at its height in the first half of the 1st millennium CE, the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas. ...
Nahuatl ( [1] is a term applied to a group of related languages and dialects of the Aztecan [2] branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, indigenous to central Mexico. ...
Templo de los Guerreros (Temple of the Warriors) at Chichen Itza. ...
Mayapan (in Spanish Mayapán) is a Pre-Columbian Maya site in the state of Yucatán, Mexico, about 40 km south-east of Mérida and 100 km west of Chichen Itza. ...
This line of scholarship was popular in the first half of the twentieth century but has largely been abandoned in recent decades in favour of a more critical and interpretive approach to the historicity of the Aztec mythical accounts, that applies a different understanding of the word Toltec.[3]
This tradition has interpreted the concept of Toltecs largely as an Aztec or generally Mesoamerican mythical and philosophical construct that has served to symbolize the civilizedness and might of several different cultures of the Mesoamerican Postclassic period. Among the Nahuan peoples the word "Tolteca" was synonymous with artist, artisan or wise man, and "toltecayotl" "Toltecness" meant art, culture and civilization and urbanism - and was seen as the opposite of "Chichimecayotl" "chichimecness" which symbolized the savage, nomadic state of peoples who had not yet become urbanized. This interpretation argues that any large urban center in Mesoamerica could be referred to as "Tollan" and its inhabitants as Toltecs - and that any ruling lineage in postclassic Mesoamerica would strengthen their claims to power by claiming Toltec ancestry. Often Mesoamerican migration accounts state that Tollan was ruled by Quetzalcoatl (or Kukulcan in Maya and Gukumatz in K'iche') a godlike mythical figure who was later sent into exile from Tollan and went on to found a new city somewhere else in Mesoamerica. Such claims of Toltec ancestry and a ruling dynasty founded by Quetzalcoatl have been made by such diverse civilizations as the Aztec, the Quiché and the Itza' Mayas. While the sceptical tradition does not deny that cultural traits of a seemingly central Mexican origin have diffused into a larger area of Mesoamerica they tend to ascribe this to the dominance of Teotihuacán in the Classic period and the general diffusion of Cultural traits within the region. Recent scholarship thus do not see Tula, Hidalgo as a "Toltec" site but rather tries to find clues of the ethnicity of the people who built it. Lately it has been suggested that they were in fact Huastecs. Mesoamerican chronology The chronology of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is usually divided into the following eras: Paleo-Indian Period c. ...
The Nahua are a group of indigenous peoples of Mexico. ...
The Chichimeca are a group of nomads in northern Mexico. ...
It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
The Kiche language (Quiché in Spanish) is a part of the Mayan language family. ...
The Aztecs is a term used for certain Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples of Mexico. ...
The Kiche (or Quiché in Spanish spelling), are a Native American people, part of the Maya ethnic group. ...
The Maya are people of southern Mexico and northern Central America (Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and El Salvador) with some 3,000 years of history. ...
It has been suggested that Huastecs be merged into this article or section. ...
The historical tradition of scholarship tries to take the Mesoamerican ethnohistorical accounts at face value and discern between a historical Toltec civilization and the way it has become integrated in Postclassic Mesoamerican mythology. It also tries to discern between the deity Quetzalcoatl and the Toltec ruler by the same name. In the view of the sceptic tradition such a distinction is impossible or extremely difficult to make exactly because the Mesoamerican peoples themselves did not discern between historical fact and mythical and metaphorical representations of these. The early tradition read the ethnohistorical sources and tried to find confirmation of these stories through archeology, but the sceptical tradition does not accept this method as fruitful because basing the understanding of Mesoamerican history on mythical accounts that were not meant to reflect actual history may lead to biased interpretations of archeological findings. Instead they prefer to let archeology speak for itself and interpret the ethnohistorical sources in a way that corroborates rather than defines the archeological findings.
During the late twentieth century, the word Toltec acquired a new meaning within certain New Age circles, largely because of the use of the word by Carlos Castaneda and others inspired by him such as Victor Sanchez. For the concept Toltec as used in the writings of Carlos Castaneda, see: Toltec (Castaneda). New Age describes a broad movement characterized by alternative approaches to traditional Western culture. ...
Carlos Castaneda (December 25, 1925/31? – April 27, 1998) was a Peruvian- or Brazilian-born American author. ...
Victor Sanchez is a Mexican author, shaman, and teacher. ...
Carlos Castaneda (December 25, 1925/31? – April 27, 1998) was a Peruvian- or Brazilian-born American author. ...
The term Toltec is used in the works of writer Carlos Castaneda to denote a person who has achieved a high state of awareness. ...
Notes
- ^ Scholars working in his tradition include Pedro Carrasco and Miguel Leon Portilla.
- ^ Enrique Florescano has argued that the "original" Tollan was Teotihuacán.
- ^ This approach has been advocated by Davíd Carrasco, Michael E Smith, J. B. Nicholson, and others.
Miguel León-Portilla (born in Mexico City, 22 February 1926) is a Mexican anthropologist and historian, and the prime authority on Nahuatl thought and literature. ...
References - Davies, Nigel (1977). The Toltecs Until the Fall of Tula. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-1394-4.
- Miller, Mary; and Karl Taube (1993). The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-05068-6.
- Ancient America Rediscovered. As recorded by Mariano Veytia (1720-1778), and compiled by Donald W. Hemingway and W. David Hemingway. 2000. Bonneville Books. ISBN 1-55517-479-5
- Smith, Michael E. (1984). "The Aztlán migrations of the Nahuatl chronicles: Myth or History?". Ethnohistory. Duke University Press.
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