Ancient Mexico in the popular mind remains synonymous with Montezuma, treasure, and the late Rider Haggard. Even those who have passed beyond the naiveties of this horizonculture have seldom progressed further than Prescott, and still envisage his genteel Aztecs as the fons et ongo of all things Mexican. The latter view, so far as the Americanist is concerned, is roughly sixty years and three research stages out of date. By 1899 Mr W. J. Payne was thus summing up the common opinion of his generation of historians, who had arrived at the second stage :—‘ To the Toltecs, among the early peoples of the New World, the first place no less indisputably belongs than to the Greeks in the Old’.