The Toltecs.
Mexican history is greatly concerned with the Toltecs, the name meaning People of Tula, or Tollan, “place of the reeds.” Evidence is accumulating that this Tula was not the comparatively insignificant ruin on the northern edge of the Valley of Mexico, but instead was the great city of San Juan Teotihuacan. The lesser Tula may have been founded about 1200 A. D., just before the collapse of Toltec power.
Archæology tells a more detailed and convincing story of the Toltecs than does recorded history. In the stratified remains at Atzcapotzalco, the objects accredited to the Toltecs overlie those of the first potters of the Archaic Period and are in striking contrast to them. The principal motives of Toltec decorative art are obviously related to the earlier more brilliant work of the Mayas. The pyramids of the Toltecs exceed in size those of the Mayas but are of inferior construction, adobe bricks with concrete facing taking the place of rubble and cut stone. The temples that crowned these pyramids were also of less solid construction and no single example is now intact. Vaulted ceilings were replaced by flat timbered ceilings or high pitched roofs of thatch. Sometimes in wide rooms columns were used as additional support for roof beams. The groundplans of buildings other than temples show small rooms arranged in an irregular fashion round courts.
The ceremonial game of tlachtli resembling basket ball was an important feature of Toltec religion. It may have been obtained from the Olmeca, but at any rate spread far and wide under the Toltec régime. Another feature of Toltec religion was the worship of the sun’s disk which is reflected in various sculptures. Also this people are supposed to have invented pulque, made from the fermented sap of the agave. The reclining type of sculpture known as Chacmool, after the famous example found at Chichen Itza in northern Yucatan, may be a relic of a peculiar Toltec cult in which drunkenness figured. Human sacrifice was another feature of the religion of the Mexican highlands in contrast to that of the lowland Mayas. On the economic side Toltec culture rested on the earlier Archaic civilization, but on the artistic and ceremonial side it was largely inspired by the Mayas through the mediation of the Zapotecs, Olmecs, and Totonacs, but with new emphasis on certain aspects and several important innovations. The language of the Toltecs seems to have been essentially the same as that of the Aztecs who succeeded them.
The Toltecs made a radical departure in social policy in that they took to war and expropriation as a means of building up national wealth, thereby paralleling, somewhat ineffectively to be sure, the political methods of Europe and Western Asia. There had been war before their time in Central America, but not apparently for aggrandizement. The Mayas, and most other Mexican and Central American nations, developed excess food supply which released many persons for the pursuit of art and science. Perhaps it was pressure of population upon food supply in an arid land that directed the Toltecs towards tribute taking. At least the fact is reasonably clear that this people did embark upon a short-lived career of conquest and that they levied tribute of precious stones and precious metals and secured by the same means an augmented food supply.
There is confusion and reduplication in the lists of Toltec rulers and only three great names in succession can be regarded as certain. These are Huetzin, Ihuitimal, and Quetzalcoatl, although it seems probable that there was a still earlier chieftain named Mixcoatl or Mixcoamazatl and that two successors of Quetzalcoatl were Matlaxochitl and Nauyotl, the last-named also figuring as the first lord of Colhuacan. Then follow various dynastic lists for several Mexican tribes which flourished between the downfall of the Toltecs and the coming of the Spaniards.