Conquests of the Imagination: Maya‐Mexican Polarity and the Story of Chichén Itzá

Abstract

For generations scholars have explained the marked difference in the ruins of Chichén Itzá by attributing the southern buildings to indigenous Yucatecan Maya and then telling of central Mexican Toltec invaders who built (or forced the Maya to build) the Tula‐like plaza to the north. But evidence now suggests that the infamous "Toltec conquest of the Maya" never happened. The story may actually be the manifestation of a Western tendency to express ambivalent attitudes toward Native Americans in terms of polar opposites, in this case, "gentle Maya priests" versus "brutal Mexican warriors." In the end, the story may reveal more about the Western politics of knowledge than about pre‐Columbian Mesoamerican history.

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