Consumption patterns in the south central Andes indicate that projectile points are the most frequent artifact type for obsidian, a pattern that becomes particularly strong with Series 5 projectile point production sometime after the onset of the Terminal Archaic circa 3300 BCE An important question in this research is, therefore, "in what form was obsidian leaving the Maymeja zone during a particular time period?"
Part of this question is answered simply by looking at the 2003 projectile point inventory: obsidian Series 5 points are actually relatively scarce in the Maymeja area, and flakes that approach Series 5 projectiles in shape, are not especially common in the collections either (see Table 6-15, above). As will be suggested by the Maymeja excavation data in Section 7.4, distinct groupings of cores and flakes discarded at the workshop suggest that reduction was following a few discrete pathways that might indicate that two trajectories, both the flake-as-core and the flake directly to implement, reduction strategies were occurring at the Chivay source.