During a preliminary visit in 2002, I climbed to the Maymeja area using the description and GPS-derived UTM coordinates provided in Burger et al. (1998:205) where I spoke with a herder named Mattias Sarallasi who was working for the land owner from Callalli, Eliseo Vilcahuaman Pambra, and living in the estancia at the base of Maymeja. Sarallasi grabbed a shovel and led me up across the moraines past several small and shallow (1-2m diameter) quarry holes that he indicated to me, and finally to the Q02-2 quarry pit.

In Burger, et al. (1998:204) the authors write that in their 1995 visit Burger and Salas "encountered a local farmer who had been collecting quantities of obsidian from these deposits for future sale." Further, they note that "according to a local farmer, a German resident of Bolivia had visited this obsidian deposit in order to collect obsidian for export to La Paz where it was transformed into craft products". An initial concern for the Upper Colca Project was establishing that the extant pit was not the result of this modern quarrying in the Maymeja area. Directly datable materials were not located in the 2003 research to confirm the antiquity of the pit, but the integrity of the stratigraphy in the test unit, and the presence of cores and bifaces in the excavation, strongly suggest that the quarry pit feature is not a recent excavation. The conclusion here, based on the soil characteristics and the small quarry pits along the ridges below Q02-2, is that recent quarrying work was responsible for the small pile of light soil inside the q02-2 quarry, and for the small quarry pits downslope. The small pile encountered inside the quarry pit feature resembles the level 2 soil encountered in the test unit, suggesting that this modern quarrying entered at least as far as the stratum that was found 15cm below the surface in the 1x1m test unit.

The regional context of this quarry pit, including the relationship between the quarry pit, a Precolumbian road leading to the quarry, and other archaeological features, are described in Section 6.4.1. A discussion of the quarrying methods that may have been used at this location can be found in Ch..