This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (March 2007)

The Atlantes – columns in the form of Toltec warriors in Tula.

A rather expressive orange-ware clay vessel in the Toltec style. For other Toltec artifacts from the American Museum of Natural History collection, click here.

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.

The scholars who have understood the Toltecs to have been an actual ethnic group often connect them to the archeological site of Tula, which is then supposed as 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 Teotihuacán² 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 Chichén Itzá have often been cited as direct evidence for Toltec dominance of the Postclassic Maya.

That 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. It is this more current perspective which 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 civility 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 Yucatec 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 skeptical 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.

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 skeptic 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 skeptical 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.

Contemporary Toltec

During the late 20th century the understanding of the Toltec tradition became controversial as a result of the much debated antropological fieldwork of Carlos Castaneda that became popularised in the 60's. In his search for studying the use of medicinal (entheogenic) plants among the native population in the southwestern United States and Mexico he allegedly met with a Yaqui indian, called Don Juan Matus, who was the central figure in a group of carriers of an esoteric Toltec tradition that had survived since the time of the conquestadors. It is obvious from this account that the Toltec tradition does not refer to a specific ethnic group or tribe. A Toltec within this account is referred to as a man or a woman of knowledge, or as a spiritual warrior. Thus has the Toltec acquired quite a different meaning within the so called New Age and entheogenic oriented circles. Apart from Castaneda and his affiliates or people inspired by him such as Victor Sanchez, one find figures as Ken Eagle Feather, and Don Miguel Ruiz, the curandera Maria Sabina and Salvador Lopez being referred to as of Toltec lineages. For the concept Toltec as used in the writings of Carlos Castaneda, see: Toltec (Castaneda).

Notes

References

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 27 November 2008, at 13:23.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by PediaView.com. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with PediaView.com.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Toltec".

The URL for this specific entry is:

• http://pediaview.com/openpedia/Toltec

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.