The Direct acquisition model describes personal visits to source areas by members of consumption households and it specifically excludes exchange of these goods between households. As per this model one should expect high variability in procurement methods, reduction strategies, and architectural and perhaps ceramics styles. Obsidian is found in both surface contexts and through quarrying, and presumably quarrying began to be practiced as the obsidian available from surface collection became more depleted. Thus, there is evidence in variability in procurement methods and in reduction strategies, however it is difficult to ascertain whether this variability results from procurement differences from non-local visitation, or from diachronic changes in available material.
It was previously suggested (Section 3.7.1) that during the Formative Period non-local visitors from the Lake Titicaca Basin, a known consumption zone for Chivay obsidian, may have left evidence of their presence during personal procurement. In the southern Titicaca Basin a distinct fiber-tempered early pottery tradition was used, but in both the north Titicaca Basin and the Colca area the contemporary pottery was grid tempered. One form of evidence of non-local personal procurement from the southern Titicaca Basin might take the form of sherds of fiber-tempered pottery from utilitarian vessels, although it may be difficult to differentiate from the evidence of fiber-tempered pottery the acquisition of obsidian through personal procurement from trade-item reciprocation. However, very little pottery, local or non-local, was identified in the Maymeja zone of the obsidian source and it is therefore difficult to use pottery to evaluate any of the procurement models. In the adjacent Block 2 survey area, obsidian scatters were often spatially coterminous with "Chiquero" pottery described by Wernke (2003) as a Formative style in the main Colca valley. As the Formative ceramics chronology in the Colca is still being defined, and there may have been differences in ceramic styles by altitudinal and ecological zone as well, it is difficult to definitively state whether all the pottery that appeared to belong to the Formative in the Chivay source area was indeed of local production.
Architecture at the Chivay source was also difficult to connect with the question of local versus non-local acquisition. Several circular structures approximately 2.5m in diameter were encountered in the area of the Maymeja workshop, but as the construction was eroded and appeared to have been expediently built, the association between these buildings and specific architectural traditions in the Colca valley or elsewhere is indeterminate. Wernke (2003) found that circular buildings were prevalent in the higher altitude portions of his survey. Further excavation in the workshop area may expose house floors or ceramics that indicate local or non-local cultural affiliation.
Direct acquisition certainly changed through prehistory from the earliest mobile foragers to the locals who procured material for household needs throughout the prehispanic past. Colca area residents probably procured obsidian for their needs from the Chivay source directly during visits to the high country that were embedded in hunting trips for viscacha, deer, and vicuña. Indeed, it was a local hunter from Chivay, Pedro Huaracha, that guided Sarah Brooks to the obsidian source in 1994 (Brooks 1998: 433-438). When non-local residents, such as residents of the Titicaca Basin, visited the Chivay source as they followed the Escalera-Lecceta route, it was perhaps for personal procurement but more likely it was in the context of caravan-mode circulation, either independent or administered, as described below.