The Atlantes – columns in the form of Toltec warriors in Tula. Tula is a town of 28432 (2005 census in the southwestern part of the state of Hidalgo in central Mexico, some 100 km to the north-northwest of Mexico City

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 American Museum of Natural History ( AMNH) located on the Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, USA is one of the largest and most

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. Mesoamerica or Meso-America (Mesoamérica is a Region extending approximately from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua, defined Polity ( Greek: Πολιτεία or Πολίτευμα transliterated as Politeía or Políteuma) was originally a term used in Ancient Greece The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences The United Mexican States ( or commonly Mexico (ˈmɛksɪkoʊ () is a federal constitutional Republic in North America. Aztec is a term used to refer to certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who achieved political 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, Hidalgo which is then supposed to have been the Tollan of Aztec myth. Tula is a town of 28432 (2005 census in the southwestern part of the state of Hidalgo in central Mexico, some 100 km to the north-northwest of Mexico City This article is about the historic cities In the science fiction television series Stargate SG-1, the "Tollan" are an advanced human civilization see ^[1] This tradition assumes the "Toltec empire" to have dominated much of central Mexico between the 10th and 12th century AD. The United Mexican States ( or commonly Mexico (ˈmɛksɪkoʊ () is a federal constitutional Republic in North America. 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. Teotihuacan is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the Pre-Columbian Americas Nahuatl ( is a group of related languages and dialects of the Aztecan or Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family 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. Chichen Itza (tʃiːˈtʃɛn iːˈtsɑː from Chi'ch'èen Ìitsha' "At the mouth of the well of the Itza " is a Mayapan ( Màayapáan in Modern Maya) (in Spanish Mayapán) is a Pre-Columbian Maya site in the state of 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. Chichen Itza (tʃiːˈtʃɛn iːˈtsɑː from Chi'ch'èen Ìitsha' "At the mouth of the well of the Itza " is a

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, 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. Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica into a number of named successive eras or periods from the earliest evidence of human habitation 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. Chichimeca was the name that the Nahuas generically applied to a wide range of semi- Nomadic peoples who inhabited the north of modern-day Mexico, and carried 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. Quetzalcoatl (Quetzalcōhuātl keʦalˈkoːwaːtɬ is an Aztec sky and creator god. Yucatec Maya ("Maaya T'aan" in the revised Orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala) is a Mayan language spoken in The K'iche' language ( Quiché in Spanish) is a part of the Mayan language family 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. Aztec is a term used to refer to certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who achieved political This page is about the Native American people for other uses the dish see Quiché (disambiguation. The Itza are a Guatemalan ethnic group of Maya affiliation speaking the Itza' language. 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. This article is about the Huastec people whose native language Wastek (Huastec is a Mayan language

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.

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. New Age ( New Age Movement and New Age Spirituality) is a Social Collective Phenomenon and a Spiritual Nature Carlos Castaneda (December 25 1925 – April 27 1998 was a Peruvian born American author For Spanish footballer See Víctor Sánchez del Amo. Victor Sanchez is a Mexican Author from Guadalajara. For the concept Toltec as used in the writings of Carlos Castaneda, see: Toltec (Castaneda). Carlos Castaneda (December 25 1925 – April 27 1998 was a Peruvian 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 spiritual awareness

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