Is Chichén Itzá Maya or Toltec?

Few questions in Maya archaeology have generated more literature, more heat, and less agreement than the cultural identity of Chichén Itzá during its 10th- and 11th-century florescence. The site is unmistakably a Maya city — it sits in the heart of the Yucatán Peninsula, its inscriptions use the Yucatec Maya language, its calendar dates are in the Maya Long Count, and its earliest monuments are in a Maya style. But the public architecture of its second, great building phase includes a wide range of forms, motifs, and ritual practices that have parallels in central Mexico, especially at the city of Tula in the modern state of Hidalgo. The debate over the relationship between the two — whether the central Mexican elements are evidence of an actual conquest by the Toltecs, of a shared Mesoamerican cultural complex, of elite emulation, or of stylistic diffusion — has been the central question of Chichén Itzá scholarship for more than a century.

For the wider context, see the Chichén Itzá main page, the history of the Maya civilization, the post-Classic period transformation and change, and the Maya society, politics, and daily life pillar. The wider question of Maya–central Mexican relations is in Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology, and the related figure of Kukulkan is in Who is Kukulkan, the Feathered Serpent.

The 19th-century debate

The “Toltec question” was born in the 19th century, when the first American travelers to the ruins of central Mexico and the Yucatán noted the similarities between the two. The first scholar to make the case systematically was Désiré Charnay, the French photographer and traveler who visited both regions in the 1860s and 1870s. Charnay argued that the similarities were evidence of a real historical connection, and that the cities of the central Mexican highlands — and especially the city of Tula — had exerted a profound influence on the cities of the northern Yucatán. His 1885 book Les anciennes villes du Nouveau Monde presented a wide range of comparative photographs that made the case visually.

The theory was developed further in 1889 by the French antiquarian Eugène Boban, who proposed that Chichén Itzá had been founded by a dynasty of central Mexican warriors who had fled the fall of Tula and had installed themselves as the ruling class of the Yucatán. Boban called this hypothetical dynasty the “Xiu” — a name borrowed from a known historical Maya lineage — and proposed that the central Mexican elements of the city were evidence of their rule. The theory was taken up and elaborated by Zelia Nuttall of the Peabody Museum of Harvard in the 1890s, who argued that the K’uk’ulkan / Quetzalcoatl legend of central Mexico referred to a real historical person who had been exiled from Tula and had founded a new dynasty at Chichén Itzá.

The “Toltec empire” theory

By the early 20th century, the Toltec theory had become a major interpretive framework. The Carnegie Institution of Washington excavations at Chichén Itzá in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s — led by Sylvanus Morley, Oliver La Farge, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff — were explicitly framed by the assumption that the central Mexican elements at the site were evidence of a Toltec conquest. Eric Thompson, the great Maya scholar of the Carnegie Institution and the most influential Maya epigrapher of the 20th century, took the position that the central Mexican elements of Chichén Itzá were evidence of a Toltec invasion of Yucatán in the 10th century CE, and that the resulting “Maya-Toltec” culture of the post-classic period was the product of a real political conquest by central Mexican warriors.

The evidence cited in favor of the Toltec theory was substantial:

The columned halls of the Temple of the Warriors and the Group of the Thousand Columns, with their processional colonnades of round columns, are very similar to the columned halls of the Burnt Palace and the Pyramid B at Tula.
The Chacmool statues at the site — recumbent figures holding offering bowls on their bellies — are a central Mexican form associated especially with Tula and the Toltec state.
The Eagle Knight and Jaguar Knight warrior orders, with their heart-extraction symbolism, are recorded in the iconography of the Temple of the Warriors and the Temple of the Jaguars.
The relief carvings of Tzompantli (skull racks), atlantids (figure-bearing columns), and the standard-bearer of Tula all have parallels at Chichén Itzá.
The Quetzalcoatl / Kukulkan iconography of the K’uk’ulkan Pyramid and the Temple of the Inscriptions at Tula is closely related to the iconography of the Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá.

The theory was widely accepted, and the second building phase of Chichén Itzá is conventionally dated to the “Toltec period” of 900–1200 CE.

The revisionist case

The Toltec theory came under sustained criticism beginning in the 1970s, as a new generation of Maya scholars began to re-evaluate the evidence. The principal objections were:

The chronology of Tula. The great building phase of Tula (the city of the Toltecs) is conventionally dated to the Postclassic period, c. 950–1150 CE in the traditional chronology. But recent re-dating, especially the work of Dan Healan of Tulane University and the Tula Archaeological Project of the 2000s, has shown that the major buildings of Tula (including the famous Atlantean statues and the Burnt Palace) may have been constructed as late as the 12th or 13th centuries. This makes the proposed migration of Toltecs to Chichén Itzá in the 10th century a chronological problem: the great Toltec buildings at Tula were being built at the same time as (or possibly after) the supposedly Toltec-influenced buildings of Chichén Itzá.
The direction of influence. The traditional model has influence flowing from Tula to Chichén Itzá. But the more recent work of Davíd Carrasco of the Harvard Divinity School and of Elizabeth Brumfiel of Northwestern University has suggested that the direction of cultural transmission may have been the reverse, with the Itzá Maya ruling dynasty of Chichén Itzá projecting influence back into central Mexico rather than vice versa.
The shared cultural complex. The similarities between Chichén Itzá and Tula are now widely read as evidence of a shared Mesoamerican cultural complex rather than a one-way cultural diffusion. The feathered serpent, the warrior orders, the Chacmool, and the columned hall are all elements that had circulated through Mesoamerica for centuries before the rise of Tula, and their appearance at Chichén Itzá in the 10th century is part of a long history of interaction between the Maya region and central Mexico.
The architectural evidence. The detailed architectural studies of Paul Gendrop, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), in the 1970s and 1980s, showed that many of the supposedly “Toltec” features of Chichén Itzá are in fact local Maya developments that have no precise parallel at Tula. The “Pyramid of Kukulkan” of Chichén Itzá, for example, has features (the serpent balustrades, the four-stairway radial form) that are not found at the comparable Pyramid B of Tula.
The epigraphic evidence. The Maya inscriptions at Chichén Itzá are written in the local Yucatec language and use the Long Count calendar of the central Maya world. There is no historical record of a foreign invasion in the 10th century, and the dynasty of the city is presented in the inscriptions as a legitimate continuation of the regional Yucatec tradition.

The “Maya-Toltec” hybrid culture

The current consensus among most Maya scholars is that the second building phase of Chichén Itzá is best understood as a hybrid Maya-Toltec culture, a local Maya development that drew on central Mexican motifs and ritual practices through a long history of contact and exchange, but that was not the result of a Toltec conquest. This position has been developed most fully by Raciel Pérez de Heredia Puente of INAH, by Vera Tiesler Blos of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, and by Clemency Chase Coggins of the Peabody Museum of Harvard, all of whom have worked extensively on the site.

The hybrid reading takes the central Mexican elements of the site seriously: they are real, and they represent a real set of cultural interactions. But it interprets them as the result of a long history of contact, of elite emulation, and of shared Mesoamerican traditions, rather than a single historical event. The key role of the Itzá Maya lineage as a local dynasty that drew on central Mexican motifs for political and ritual purposes is now the dominant interpretation.

The historical Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl

The role of Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl in the Toltec question is treated in detail in Who is Kukulkan, the Feathered Serpent. Briefly: Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl is a figure of central Mexican historical legend, named in the post-Columbian sources as a ruler of the mythical city of Tollan (Tula) in the 10th century CE, who was supposedly driven into exile in the Gulf Coast region. The identification of this figure with K’uk’ulkan of the Maya world, and his supposed journey from central Mexico to Chichén Itzá, was a major part of the 19th- and 20th-century Toltec theory. The historical evidence for the legendary Quetzalcoatl is treated in Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology and in the history of the Maya civilization.

The “Maya-Toltec” terminology

The term “Maya-Toltec” was coined in the late 19th century and is still used in the literature, though with increasing qualification. The Maya-Toltec or Toltec-Maya tradition is the cultural style of the northern Yucatán in the period c. 900–1200 CE, and is associated especially with the cities of Chichén Itzá, Mayapán, and (to a lesser extent) Tulum. The style is characterized by:

The use of round columns in public architecture.
A preference for processional halls and columned ranges.
The presence of Chacmool statues and the iconography of the eagle and jaguar warrior orders.
The figure of K’uk’ulkan / Quetzalcoatl as a major deity.
A revival of stelae in the local Yucatec tradition, often with a less refined carving style than the earlier classic monuments.

The cultural reading of the Maya-Toltec tradition is treated in the wider context of Maya society, politics, and daily life and Maya art, architecture, and monuments.

The modern reading

The current consensus, then, is that Chichén Itzá is best understood as a Maya city with central Mexican influences, and that the debate is now less about whether the city is “Maya or Toltec” than about how to interpret the central Mexican elements. The most influential recent positions are:

The “shared Mesoamerican complex” reading, which emphasizes the long history of contact and the common cultural substrate.
The “Itzá projection” reading, which emphasizes the role of the local Itzá dynasty in adopting and adapting central Mexican motifs.
The “post-classic cosmopolitanism” reading, which interprets the second building phase of Chichén Itzá as part of a wider post-classic cultural flowering across Mesoamerica.

All three readings agree that the city is fundamentally Maya in its linguistic, calendrical, and political framework, and that the central Mexican elements are a kind of cultural overlay rather than a separate cultural tradition.

Sources

Martin, S. & Grube, N. (2008). Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens (2nd ed.). Thames & Hudson. — link
Fash, W. L. (2001). Scribes, Warriors and Kings: The City of Copán and the Ancient Maya. Thames & Hudson. — link
Stuart, D. & Stuart, G. E. (2008). Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya. Thames & Hudson. — link
Demarest, A. A. et al. (1997). The Petexbatun Regional Archaeological Project: A Multidisciplinary Study of the Maya Collapse. Vanderbilt University (final reports). — link
Canuto, M. A. et al. (2018). Ancient lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala. Science 361 (6409), eaau0137. — link
Chase, A. F. & Chase, D. Z. (2014). Ancient Maya Cities and the Caracol Project. University of Pittsburgh Latin American Archaeology. — link
Miller, M. E. (1986). The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton University Press. — link