The Independent Caravans model entails household level organization of long-distance caravans for the acquisition of specific goods from another region, or for moving goods between a number of communities in a loop and bartering for goods at various locations along the route. The material expectations of this type of obsidian circulation in the Chivay source area include episodic but intense procurement while a caravan was stopped at the obsidian source, and prompt transport of obsidian southward from the Maymeja source area to a principal thoroughfare that connects the Colca with regional travel routes.
The 2003 Upper Colca project results support an interpretation of obsidian production at the Maymeja quarry and the workshop through procurement and circulation by independent llama caravanners, with this mode occurring from the Terminal Archaic through at least the Early Formative. The 2003 results support this interpretation at a number of scales.
(1) Dates.The14C samples collected from the workshop test unit show that intensified production occurred between 2880 and 1260 cal BCE. Based on the evidence of intensity of production, levels 2 through 4 at the quarry pit test unit [Q02-2u2] are tentatively linked with levels 4 and 5 at the workshop [Q02-2u3].
(2) Camelid pastoralist emphasis.Why was obsidian from the quarry pit not reduced at the quarry pit? Instead it appears to have been transported down slope 600m to a site adjacent to water and to a lush grazing area. There are a number of links between pastoralism and obsidian production at the source area that have been explored in detail above.
(3) Transport.It does not appear that locals participating in down-the-line exchange networks were responsible for quarrying and then processing obsidian at the Chivay source workshop because obsidian flakes and cores in the local consumption sites were much smaller than one would expect if local pastoralists were quarrying for large nodules.
(4) Regional consumption.The temporality of consumption in distant sites like Qillqatani suggests that regular, caravan-based exchange was the mode of transport between the source and the consumption zone. It seems more like that caravan traffic, rather than Direct Procurement and Down-the-line exchange, would have resulted in Chivay obsidian consistently representing 10% to 20% of the lithics assemblage at Qillqatani for a period of several thousand years.
That is not to imply that procurement and production for other modes of transport, including personal acquisition and down-the-line exchange, did not occur in Maymeja; only that the intensified production associated with quarrying work and concentrated reduction activities appear to have been linked to caravan-based export. While the pastoral link and the intensified production seem irrefutable, the challenge remains to differentiate independent from administered caravans.