Caravans organized and administered by elites are described in colonial documents from the Lake Titicaca Basin. According to these passages, Titicaca Basin herders could pay part of their annual labor obligations by contributing their labor and their caravan llamas to elite-organized long-distance caravan ventures that procured non-local goods that were, in turn, redistributed to the Titicaca Basin community in the form of feasts. Material expectations at the Chivay source for obsidian procurement and circulation under elite-sponsored caravans were discussed in Section 3.7.4. It could be relatively difficult to differentiate independent from elite-sponsored caravans from archaeological evidence because the actual caravanners in either case are commoners from altiplano herding communities.
Evidence of elite-organized obsidian procurement was not found, nor were walls or other defensive structures encountered that would have been protecting the obsidian source for some kind of access monopoly. Social mechanisms for monitoring and control of the source area are a possibility in prehistory but evidence of the use of distinctive artifact styles as a signal of "ownership" of the source area were not encountered in 2003. This is consistent with other obsidian sources in the Andes, such as Alca and Quispisisa (Burger, et al. 1998;Burger and Glascock 2002;Jennings and Glascock 2002), where quarrying remains and workshops rarely contain discrete evidence of hierarchy at the source, or even cultural affiliation from specific groups known to have used those sources, such as the Wari. In North America, in an examination of Mississippian chiefdom hoe production and consumption, Cobb (2000: 195) found no evidence of hierarchy at the Mill Creek quarries over the course of four centuries of quarrying. Cobb compares this with ethnographically documented quarrying in New Guinea for ceremonial axe blades, and similarly at this quarry no evidence was found of hierarchy in production in a tribal society, despite the fact that the blades were often finished at the quarry site (Burton 1984).
The geography of the Chivay source area presents natural defensive features, such as restricted entrances to the Maymeja area that are only available along a half-dozen routes that are not cliff faces. None of the access routes showed evidence of defensive fortification or restriction. In fact, these routes were generally improved with a roadway on one exit [A03-268] and a short portion of stairway on another egress. The consumption patterns of obsidian from the Late Formative until the Inka period do not suggest that evidence of elite-sponsored quarrying would be encountered (Section 3.5.3) Assemblages at Tiwanaku suggest to Giesso (2003) that the state controlled the acquisition of obsidian from Chivay (Cotallalli) and basalt from Querimita, however there are a number of articulation points between the Chivay source and the Tiwanaku core 300 km to the south-east where the state could exercise control of the obsidian entering the core region. Recent perspectives on the probable ethnic diversity subsumed by the corporate strategies of the Tiwanaku state (Goldstein 2005;Janusek 2004;Stanish 2002) highlight the variability that might be expected in the nature of relationships between Tiwanaku elites and communities in its periphery. If the internal ethnic constituency of the Tiwanaku state, and the polities that preceded Tiwanaku in the Titicaca Basin, were more diverse than previously thought, then it is possible that many of the corporate themes were a reflection of the need to centralize the political economy because the population was relatively heterogeneous.
In the Chivay source area, the only distinctive evidence of non-local, state-affiliated materials were sherds and architecture in styles belonging to the imperial Inka. These sherds and structures are almost certainly mortuary facilities, although it is also possible that they are shrines associated with water emerging from the spring in Maymeja. Given the reduced importance of obsidian in the Inka sphere, it seems unlikely that the Inka presence in the Maymeja area was related to administered obsidian production.