Abstract
Tula, Hidalgo, was an important early Postclassic city that dominated much of central Mexico as well as adjacent regions to its north and west. For many decades, Tula was thought to be the city that early colonial documents referred to as “Tollan,” or “place of the reeds.” It is clear that the Aztec Empire, a later civilization that dominated a much larger area, revered Tollan and connected themselves to the city and its people, the Toltecs, in various ways. Recent research has questioned whether Tula was indeed the Tollan that the Aztecs revered; instead, Tollan may have been a concept that referred to all of the great civilizations that preceded the Aztecs. These two perspectives, which I frame as the “single Tollan/many Tollans” debate, have important consequences for our understanding of the early Postclassic period as well as colonial configurations of power. I argue that to understand the Aztecs’ relationships with their past, and the colonial consequences of those relationships, it is important to shift away from questions of truth. Instead, I concentrate on historical narratives and the social, material, and biological effects that they produced, including the early and late Aztec interventions at Tula. I argue that Jorge Acosta’s data provide evidence for an Early Aztec period termination ritual and a Late Aztec period New Fire ceremony that ushered in a new population boom at Tula. In turn, these connections allowed for the unprecedented rise of the Moctezuma family during the colonial period. This evidence forms part of a broader argument that the two sides of the Tula debate are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they both form part of attempts to control, claim, and revere the past in the inherently unstable fields of power that characterized the late Postclassic and early colonial periods in central Mexico.
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In this article I use the term “Aztec” for two purposes: to connote a group of people and to connote particular kinds of material culture (principally Black-on-Orange ceramics) that in turn define two time periods in the Basin of Mexico. The term Aztec, when used for people, is controversial because it is a modern, etic word (Nichols and Rodríguez-Alegría 2017). Here, I follow Elizabeth Boone in using Aztec to refer to “the Nahua-speaking peoples of Central Mexico who shared a common political system, religion, and iconography” (Boone 2000:11). I also adopt the term “Mexica” to refer specifically to the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan (Boone 2000:11). Mexica is an emic term and predates the establishment of the Aztec Empire.
Aztec material culture, which in this article primarily concerns ceramics produced in the Basin of Mexico, partially correlates with the people that I am calling Aztec, though they were used by an even more diverse group of people. Aztec ceramics, particularly the distinctive Black-on-Orange decorative wares, are concentrated in the Basin of Mexico. In later phases, Aztec III Black-on-Orange (dated between 1350 and 1520 ad) ceramics also appear as imports in distant city-states, some hundreds of kilometers away from Tenochtitlan, but they continued to be produced in the Basin (Smith 1990). Aztec ceramics are indicative of the importance of exchange rather than imperial control (Smith 1990: 163–164). The common chronological division between the Early Aztec Period (Aztec I/II, ad 1100–1350) and the Late Aztec Period (Aztec III/IV, ad 1350 to sixteenth century) roughly corresponds with the period before and after the founding of Tenochtitlan in the ethnohistorical sources, respectively (Minc 2017).
See Trouillot 1995 for a similar argument regarding historical constructivism and relativism.
The Florentine Codex, the Anales de Cuautitlan, and the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas were originally commissioned and compiled very shortly after conquest (Nicholson 2001:xxix-L). The accounts subsequently underwent several revisions; the compilation and organization of the Florentine Codex, for example, was Sahagún’s lifework (Ricard 1966:39–45).
It may be mythical, or it may even be Tenochtitlan itself: see Boone 1999:144
Boone (1999) does not present a date, but notes that Tollan assumes importance in the textual descriptions of the migration.
The chac mool that graces the Tlaloc half of the second phase of the Templo Mayor was placed there during the reigns of Acamapichtili, Huitilhuitl, and Chimalpopoca, just before the consolidation of the Triple Alliance.
There is some debate about the precise nature of this royal garment; it has been argued that the garment was in fact a matrix of knotted thread inlaid with turquoise stones (Aguilera 1997), rather than a simpler tie-dyed cotton garment as Anawalt (1990) suggests. Nonetheless, all sources agree that a similar cape worn by Toltec nobility inspired the royal garment.
Extrapolating from a late-sixteenth century urban population of 2364 ( García and Victor, 2003:128), in combination with data that shows that indigenous populations in central Mexico were decimated by epidemic disease (Cook and Borah 1971:80), I agreed with Richard Diehl’s (1983:166) population estimate of around 20,000 people during the Late Aztec phase in Tula (Iverson 2015).
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This research was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF DDIG 1156359), a Peyton and Douglas Wright Memorial Fellowship, and a University of Texas Departmental Continuing Fellowship award.
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Iverson, S.D. The Enduring Toltecs: History and Truth During the Aztec-to-Colonial Transition at Tula, Hidalgo. J Archaeol Method Theory 24, 90–116 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-017-9316-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-017-9316-4