The Toltecs ruled much of Maya central Mexico from the tenth to twelfth centuries A.D. The Toltecs were the last dominant Mesoamerican culture before the Aztecs, and inherited much from Maya civilization. The Toltec capital was at Tula, 80 kilometres north of Mexico City. The most impressive Toltec ruins, however, are at Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, where a branch of Toltec culture survived beyond the civilization's fall in central Mexico.
Mesoamerican civilization based on the Olmec.
(Nahuatl) A pre-Hispanic ethnic group whose center was the city of Tula. In the 15th and 16th centuries, both before and after the conquest, Tula and the Toltecs were understood as paragons of high culture by indigenous people of Central Mexico.
The word Toltec in Mesoamerican studies has been used in different ways by different scholars to refer to actual populations and polities of precolumbian central Mexico or to the mythical ancestors mentioned in the mythical/historical narratives of the Aztecs. It is an ongoing debate whether the Toltecs can be understood to have formed an actual ethnic group at any point in Mesoamerican history or if they are mostly or only a product of Aztec myth.