The Toltecs: Tula and the Myth of Quetzalcóatl

After the collapse of Teotihuacan in the seventh and eighth centuries CE left a power vacuum on the central Mexican highlands, migrating Chichimec groups converged with Nonoalca and Tolteca-Chichimeca populations to found Tula, in the present-day state of Hidalgo. Archaeology places the rise of Tula Grande at roughly 900 to 1150 CE, when the city may have held between 30,000 and 60,000 inhabitants and controlled a long-distance trade network built around green obsidian from the nearby Sierra de las Navajas. Toltec society combined a warrior elite with priests specialized in the calendar and religious cult, a pattern that anticipated the later organization of Aztec society, and in Late Postclassic sources the word "tolteca" itself came to mean "refined artisan" or "civilized person" rather than a strict ethnic label.