Conquest of Mexico
culture with the Toltec, with whom were associated the god Quetzalcoatl, the calendar, agriculture, the arts of stone-cutting and pottery, and the great pyramids at Cholula and San Juan Teotihuacan. Now the name Quetzalcoatl is a literal translation of one of the most important Maya gods, Kukulkan. The Mexican calendar is a much simplified form of that of the Maya, and, unlike its parent, is unfitted to deal with long periods of time. Further, the recent excavations at Teotihuacan have revealed a style of art obviously based upon that of the Maya.
To judge from the evidence afforded by the scanty excavations conducted on serious lines in the Mexican Valley, three main periods may be distinguished in its culture-history. First a primitive period, the remains of which show affinities with those of the Tarascans of Michoacan and the early inhabitants of the Panuco Valley. From this archaic culture there is a transition to remains of the Toltec period. This Toltec period was evidently of long duration, and the remains of the subsequent Aztec period represent a very short space of time. The Toltecs were immigrants from the north, a region where culture was at a comparatively low stage, and where no buildings on pyramidal substructures, so characteristic of the Maya, are found. They were the first wave of Nahuatl-speaking invaders, whose tongue reaches as far north as the State of Montana, to break upon the Mexican Valley. Here they came into contact with that offshoot of the Maya culture which had spread up from the south and east, and proved such good foster-mothers that in Mexico it became associated with their name. Other groups of Nahuatl speakers followed, and finally came the Aztec, a band of skinclad hunter-warriors, armed with a weapon hitherto unknown in Mexico, the bow. In the last stages of the Toltec period, a development in religious thought led to the introduction of human sacrifice, a practice which appears to have been alien to the early Maya culture. This was adopted by the more recently arrived Nahuatl tribes; trouble and discontent arose in the Valley, and culminated with the rise of the Aztec and a wholesale migration of tribes who had preserved the Toltec blood and tradition in purer form. Numbers of them appear to have wandered forth through Puebla, Vera Cruz, and Tabasco, and even to have reached Yucatan, where their art is certainly reflected in the later monuments at Chichén Itzá. Where they passed or settled they sowed the seeds of their culture, so that the works of
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