Non-market administered trade was another major means of transfer in the prehispanic south-central Andes. Building on Polanyi's classic definition of non-capitalist economic types, Charles Stanish (2003: 69) describes a form of elite-administered, non-market trade that was capable of procuring non-local goods and that provided wealth to elites as follows. Garci Diez's Titicaca Basin visita, a 16^thcentury Spanish census document (Diez de San Miguel 1964 [1567]), describes how local elites in the Lake Titicaca Basin would have their constituents organize llama caravans for trading expeditions to adjacent regions. In neighboring areas such as the Amazon basin to the east, the Cusco valley, and western slope valleys, agricultural goods such as corn, fruits, and other products were sweeter, faster growing, and more abundant than in the Titicaca Basin. The colonial visitaindicates that, based on the colonial currency, corn in the Titicaca Basin was worth 5.7 to 6.9 times the amount that it was worth in the Sama valley (an area in modern-day southern Bolivia) where it was abundant. Stanish (2003: 69-70) argues that administered trade benefited elites because they were able to appropriate this difference in value, and through feasting and other ceremonial functions, a portion of this wealth was redistributed to commoners. It is important to mention that these same colonial sources indicate that the commoners also organized trading ventures and would take advantage of these elite-organized journeys to conduct private barter exchange on the side. With reference to herders conscripted into elite orchestrated trade caravans "those in Lupaca country 'who had their own cattle [cargo llamas]' (Diez de San Miguel 1964 [1567], f. 13v) went to the coast and to the lomas to barter on their own. …the maize growers on the irrigated coast were eager for the highlander's animals, their wool and meat" (Murra 1965: 201). Thus, elites organized large caravans and apparently possessed the surplus wealth and the camelid caravan animals in advance to initiate the trading expedition, but the herders that they conscripted also engaged in household-level barter. For the elites, their organizational efforts earned them significant wealth and status for a relatively modest outlay of costs. For the herders, it appears that they were able to embed household economic transactions with their mit'alabor service by conducting their side barter activities. Apparently, even the powerful Lupaca elite had to concede some independent trade activity to their caravan drivers. What, then, of the relationship between caravanerosand elites during earlier periods, when elites probably had less consolidated power than during the contact period?

The evidence suggests that "administered trade" was not the first form of long distance caravan exchange. As mentioned above, relationships of balanced reciprocity have long served to articulate herders with those living in complementary ecozones such as sierra agriculturalists, coastal fishers, and residents of the eastern lowlands. But the long distance transport of diffusive goods like obsidian are well-demonstrated and form a continuous network configuration that contrasts with the segmentary, vertically organized exchange between valley and puna (Figure 2-3). Archaeological distributions (Browman 1981;Burger, et al. 2000;Dillehay and Nuñez 1988;Nuñez and Dillehay 1995 [1979]) and contemporary ethnoarchaeological studies (Lecoq 1988;Nielsen 2000;West 1981) attest to the capacity for small scale, household-level organization of multi-week caravan expeditions. This evidence suggests that there were probably at least two major types of long distance caravans operating from the Late Formative onwards. The question then becomes: what was the relationship between household-level caravans and elite-administered trade? Did elites co-opt functions that were previously coordinated on the household level? If elites acquired control of some segment of caravan traffic, what strategies did elites use to wrest control from caravan drivers that, the evidence suggests, were very independently-minded people (Browman 1990: 419-420;Nielsen 2000: 517-520)? These questions concerning the origins and configurations of regional interaction in the south-central Andes are at the center of this discussion of changes in obsidian procurement and the regional circulation of goods in prehistory on the perimeter of the Lake Titicaca Basin.