Tula and the Toltecs: the leading city of central Mexico

The Tula region had long been home to peoples of varied origin, perhaps including Nonoalca from the southern Gulf coast and Chichimeca from the north. As Teotihuacan declined, from about 650 a town, Tula Chico, grew there; it was burned and abandoned between about 850 and 900, and a new ceremonial centre, Tula Grande, was laid out about 1.5 km to the south. Its heyday, the Tollan phase, is dated differently by different authors — 900–1150, 950–1150 by Richard Diehl, 900–1200 by Alba Guadalupe Mastache and her colleagues. At its height the city covered some 14–16 km²; estimates of its population range from at least 35,000 (Diehl) to about 60,000 (Mastache, Cobean and Healan), and another 20,000–25,000 lived in the surrounding countryside. It was larger than any of its contemporaries in central Mexico, though smaller than Teotihuacan had been. Maize — much of it irrigated — beans, chilli, amaranth, squash and maguey were grown, though perhaps not enough to feed the city; about half of its people seem to have worked obsidian, and its trade brought plumbate pottery from Guatemala and polychrome ware from Costa Rica.

Its ceremonial heart was a great plaza framed by colonnaded halls with more than a kilometre of benches carved with processions of warriors, two ballcourts and Pyramid B, crowned by four basalt columns about 4.6 m high in the form of warriors with spear-throwers, which once held up the roof of a temple. A ‘serpent wall’ (coatepantli) surrounded the pyramid, and friezes show jaguars, coyotes and eagles devouring human hearts. The likeness of Pyramid B and its colonnades to the Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, more than 1,000 km to the east, has been debated ever since Désiré Charnay, the first archaeologist to work at Tula, proposed that a Toltec army had conquered Chichén Itzá. That theory is now largely rejected; others have suggested that Tula was a colony of Chichén Itzá or that the two cities had only looser, mainly trading ties, and no explanation is generally accepted. The obsidian of both cities came mostly from the same two sources. Michael E. Smith and Lisa Montiel judge that Tula ruled a regional kingdom rather than an empire.

From around 1000 exhausted soils and a drier climate strained the city; by about 1150 many of its quarters were abandoned, and in the 12th century its ceremonial centre was burned and its pyramids wrecked. For the Aztecs Tollan was the model of civilization, and ‘Toltec’ came to mean ‘master craftsman’. Their chronicles tell of the priest-king Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, who forbade human sacrifice, was tricked by the god Tezcatlipoca into leaving the city and went away to the Gulf coast. These are legends with contradictory dates, and since the 1990s many scholars have treated the Toltecs of Aztec tradition as a largely mythical construct. The ruins at Tula were identified with Tollan in 1941 by Wigberto Jiménez Moreno and other Mexican scholars; Jorge Acosta’s excavations, begun in 1940, and later projects of the 1970s supported the identification.