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Toltec
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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. There is a key scholarly debate over whether the Toltecs were ever a genuine ethnicity or genuine polity, or if they are rather a myth produced by the Aztecs and/or by other civilizations of the region.
A school of thought popular in the first half of the 20th century, represented by Pedro Carrasco and Miguel Leon Portilla, held the Toltecs to have been an actual ethnic group.
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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. There is a key scholarly debate over whether the Toltecs were ever a genuine ethnicity or genuine polity, or if they are rather a myth produced by the Aztecs and/or by other civilizations of the region.
A school of thought popular in the first half of the 20th century, represented by Pedro Carrasco and Miguel Leon Portilla, held the Toltecs to have been an actual ethnic group. This school of thought connected the "Toltecs" to the archaeological site of Tula, which was taken to be the Tollan of Aztec myth. This tradition assumes that much of central Mexico was dominated by a "Toltec empire" between the 10th and 12th century AD. Other Mexican cities have been speculated 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 influx of certain Central Mexican cultural traits into the Mayan sphere of dominance that took place in the late classic and early Postclassic periods; 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 of Toltec dominance of the Postclassic Maya.
This line of scholarship has largely been abandoned in recent decades in favor of a more critical and interpretive approach to the historicity of the Aztec mythical accounts. Among the scholars adopting the revisionist approach include Davíd Carrasco, Michael E Smith, and J. B. Nicholson. This approach applies a different understanding of the word Toltec, interpreting it as largely a mythical and philosophical construct by either the Aztecs or Mesoamericans generally that served to symbolize the might and sophistication of several different civilizations 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 it was common practice among ruling lineages in Postclassic Mesoamerica to strengthen its claims to power by claiming Toltec ancestry. Mesoamerican migration accounts often 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 elsewhere in Mesoamerica. 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 school of thought does not deny that cultural traits of a seemingly central Mexican origin have diffused into a larger area of Mesoamerica, it tends 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 does 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.
Yet other Mesoamericanists believe that both the preceding approaches are partly true. Taking the Mesoamerican ethnohistorical accounts at face value more or less, they posit that there was a genuine historical Toltec civilization which became mythologized by other Postclassic civilizations. These scholars try to discern the genuine amid the myths, for example, to distinguish between the historical Toltec ruler named Quetzalcoatl and the deity of the same name. According to the second, skeptical tradition, such a distinction is impossible or extremely difficult to make exactly because the Mesoamerican peoples themselves did not distinguish between historical fact and mythical and metaphorical representations of historical fact. The earlier school mentioned above read the ethnohistorical sources and tried to find confirmation of these stories through archaeology, but the skeptical school 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 archaeological findings. Instead, they prefer to let archaeology speak for itself and while they interpret the ethnohistorical sources in a way that corroborates rather than defines the archaeological findings.
Contemporary Toltec
During the late 20th century the understanding of the Toltec tradition became further muddied as a result of the writings of Carlos Castaneda that became popular bestsellers in the 1960's and 1970's. While supposedly studying the use of medicinal (entheogenic) plants among the native population in the southwestern United States and Mexico he alleged to have 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 conquistadors. Castaneda did not use the term "Toltec" in its genuine academic sense (pertaining to history), but instead as a label for persons who are either sages or "spiritual warriors". This is how "New Agers" use the term "Toltec".
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