A principal question concerning the Chivay obsidian source area, when it was finally located in the 1990s, was whether cultural materials showing Titicaca Basin stylistic affiliation would be found at the source area. The lack of known Pukara or Tiwanaku materials in the vicinity of the source, as confirmed by the Upper Colca research project, suggests that access to the source was not physically restricted, and that perhaps neighboring groups were granted access as needed. Other plausible explanations are that, even in the Middle Horizon, material moved through down-the-line trade and no diagnostic, non-perishable materials were reciprocated back to the source area. Alternately, a freelance trading entity was responsible for transporting the material towards Titicaca, but this group traded exclusively with Titicaca Basin polities and curiously none of the material found its way into the Wari sphere despite the proximity of Wari-influenced sites in the lower valley. Given Tiwanaku's demonstrated strategy of placing colonies, sometimes integrated multiethnic, directly adjacent to resources of interest (Goldstein 1989), it seemed possible that a site with a Tiwanaku component would be found adjacent to the Chivay source.

The obsidian data do not appear to conform to the expected pattern of postulated multiethnic "artisan islands" within the vertical archipelago model proposed by John Murra (1972, pp. 442-443) in which rare or restricted resources such as metal ores, or here different obsidian types, are shared by different groups; in this case, each group (Huari and Tiahuanaco) would have had colonies to acquire the resource for the distant homeland (Burger, et al. 2000: 342).

A central goal of the 2003 research at the Chivay source was to examine the source area for evidence of such "artisan island" sites, but no such sites were encountered.