The circuit mobility model of Nuñez and Dillehay (Dillehay and Nuñez 1988;1995 [1979]) depicts the regional integration between "axis settlements" as articulated by circuits of caravan traffic (Section 3.2.6). Some of these circuits grew to become the dominant exchange routes in a region. Despite the historical and adaptational focus of the circuit mobility model, the model's emphasis on the integrating role of camelid caravan networks linking dispersed communities in the altiplano highlights the importance of regional context in the emergence of political power in the transegalitarian milieu of the Titicaca Basin Formative.

The dynamic and decentralized Nunez and Dillehay model is compelling for understanding regional obsidian distributions in two ways. First, this model emphasizes the regular interaction that linked dispersed communities, often second-tier communities, across broad spaces. Obsidian appears to have had some social and symbolic significance, but it was only moderately rare and therefore it appears to have circulated relatively widely and continually between regional centers and also within second-tier and smaller communities. Thus the significance of obsidian is not principally as a "wealth item" like precious metals that served to differentiate elites in a type of network strategy (Blanton, et al. 1996). Rather, obsidian circulation, and the parties responsible for procuring and circulating it, depicts the subsistence level economic and cultural links upon which early aggrandizers likely constructed their political strategy.

During earlier time periods, such as during the Terminal Archaic when obsidian was first being intensified, it could be argued that obsidian was a rare "prestige technology" (Hayden 1998) that would confer advantages on the owner and would otherwise serve to differentiate people. Helms (1992: 159) describes how those conveying exotic materials were "long-distance travelers or contact agents as politico-religious specialists" in contact with the mysterious and distant (see discussion in Section 2.2.5). Such associations would arguably have been more likely during the earlier, emergent stages of regular caravan networks (e.g., the Terminal Archaic) under the assumption that sustained contact and diminished scarcity of a non-local material like obsidian would have probably reduced the social or symbolic power of such goods. Nevertheless, obsidian appears to have retained symbolically exotic associations that persisted in some form given the Late Prehispanic contexts: concentrations of obsidian in ritual mounds at Tiwanaku, and unmodified Chivay nodules at the gates of Machu Picchu (Section 3.5.3). However, given its abundance in the Early and Middle Formative sites, and the occurrence of obsidian in both commoner and elite contexts in the Late Formative, it would be difficult to argue that obsidian was status-conferring due simply to its non-local origin in that time period.