Direct household procurement of goods is largely structured by the geographic relationships between consumer residence and a given resource. Access to products from complementary ecological zones by consumers who undertake a personal voyage to acquire and gather those goods is a form of direct access. For resources that are widely distributed in ecological areas or along altitudinal bands, direct access is a recurring theme in Andean prehistory. The procurement of unique or unevenly distributed or resources, such as salt or obsidian, is a different configuration entirely in a vertically organized region like the Andes, because distant consumers are forced to articulate with production areas far beyond their immediate and complementary neighbors in an altitudinally stratified exchange relationship. This kind of multiethnic, direct household procurement for salt occurs in the Andes to this day (Concha Contreras 1975: 74-76;Flores Ochoa 1994: 125-127;Oberem 1985 [1974];Varese 2002).

Direct access by foragers was the first mode of procurement in the Andes, and this acquisition mode probably dominated in Early Holocene prior to the population growth that permitted the development of reciprocity networks. The procurement of raw materials in a manner that is incidental to other subsistence activities is a more efficient means of acquiring these goods, an activity described as "embedded procurement" by Binford (1979: 279). Communities, ethnic groups, and even prehistoric states appear to have maintained direct access to resources in other zones, and (as is stipulated by the definition of the direct accessmode) this kind of articulation is for direct consumption or redistribution on the level of the corporate or state entity. This is part of a much celebrated pattern in Andean research, a feature known as vertical complementary (Murra 1972), a topic that will be returned to in more detail below. Direct access by states to unusual sources of raw material such as metals and minerals are well documented in the Andes. These include as Inka mine works, and distinctive Inka artifacts and architecture are commonly encountered in association with the procurement areas. In access between herding and agricultural sectors, there is also an ethnographically documented direct access mode described as "ethnic economies". In this direct access mode, ethnic groups will control parallel strips of vertical land holdings, and sometimes non-contiguous tracts, ranging from lower agricultural zones to high puna that may lie several thousand vertical meters above. This pattern is documented on the eastern slope of the Andes for the Q'eros of Cuzco (Brush 1976;Flores Ochoa, et al. 1994) and several communities in northern Potosí in Bolivia (Harris 1982;Harris 1985). The important concept of the direct access organization is that entities that were consuming the goods were directly responsible for acquiring them. If there is inter-household barter or transfer of any kind, then the arrangement likely belongs to a type of reciprocity relationship.