This question spawns out of a casual interest for me to use the Toltecs of Mesoamerica as a setting for a fiction story. I wanted to use good anthropology/archeology to frame the story. But the more I researched them, the more ephemeral they seemed. I've included below the sequence that lead to my question.

Often, Wikipedia has more than sufficient information for a casual interest in a topic, but when I looked there, I found that the Wikipedia entries on the Toltecs, Tula, Toltecayotl, Chitzen-Itza and related topics are a mess of contradictory stories and dates. So I kept looking further afield.

An broader Web search lead me to the pagan/shaman writings from the 1970s, where Carlos Castaneda and later Miguel León Portilla created a religious movement around the Toltec philosophies. That created a lot of pseudoscience/mystic followers. And then I found accusations in multiple places that Castenada and Portilla had fabricated much of their content. I couldn't prove those assertions one way or another, but both men backed up their claims with plenty of historical sources, so I dug into those. But digging deeper into those historical sources, I found lots of contradictions. Spanish monks in the 1600s listed dates that just didn't square with any archeology evidence. And the Spanish often seemed to have an interest in trying to prove that St. Thomas had, for some reason, sailed to the New World to promote Christ, so they "fit" the stories they collected to this notion.

The online data gets further muddled by the Mormons -- there's a deep black hole of online ancient conspiracy theories that you can wander around in for days, including that Chitzen-Itza's architecture is directly tied to the Antikythera Mechanism.

So I abandoned the Web and tried to track down peer-reviewed textbooks. And here I found good research -- research that was contradicted repeatedly every 10 years or so. That research is even cited with in this subreddit under the question: "What do we know about the inhabitants of the Toltec capital, Tula?"

Finally, I have found a book called "Twin Tollans: Chichen Itza, Tula, and the Epiclassic to Early Postclassic Mesoamercian World" published in 2007. The papers therein are from a round table discussion among multiple academics working on the Toltec question, and their position -- expressed over 500 pages -- is essentially that the Toltecs never existed.

That seems to me to be the one viable hypothesis that fits the stuff I've been reading. The Spanish asked the Aztecs for stories. The Aztecs provided stories. The Aztecs elaborated on those tales, the Spanish curve-fit those tales, then sloppy modern researchers used those tales as first sources, and they got repeated often enough that other data was then curve fit into it.

And this leads me to ask my question. Were the Toltecs entirely invented by Aztecs telling stories to the Spanish? Does anyone have further sources that I should be investigating to contradict this hypothesis?