Although the Taira Tulán sites outnumber the Confluencia ones

Although the Taira Tulán sites outnumber the Confluencia ones, both are found throughout the tiffany watches region, bearing tacit witness to how the different communities shared a diverse bur collective imagery. However, this apparenr homogeneity is contradicted by the importance and scale of certain settlements of the period, most notably those of the Tulán Ravine (Pollard 1970; Benavente 1982; Núñez 1992; Sinclaire 2004). Indeed, the semi-underground structures found at this site would have required a large workforce to construct. Judging from the waste and offerings found, this place must have functioned as a ceremonial gathering place (Núñez et al. 2006a). The abundance of exotic goods found at these sites and their evident ritual nature lead one to believe that the Ttilán pastoral communities were able to control and manage the access to, circulation and distribution of trade goods both into and out of the region. The social and tiffany engagement rings inequality between those who raised livestock and those who hunted is masked by the formal content of rock art, which endows the activities of each with the same level of prestige (Gallardo & De Souza 2008).

In the Late Formative period the appearance of the Cueva Blanca rock art, and the related Alto Ramirez style in textiles, coincides with the appearance of copper alloy metallurgy. The Cueva Blanca style not only adopted the Alto Ramirez structure and iconography but recreated it through painting, in its own particular mode of expression that enabled its creators to move beyond simple reproduction. This close iconographie relationship could be ascribed to a visual culture, that not only enabled sharing of the prestige associated with the populations north of the Loa River, but also was a way of neutralising in the collective imaginary the unequal access to new technologies that were adopted in those times. The Late Formative was a time when new avenues of trade produced symbolic and cheap bangles clientelism in these communities in relation to others situated in the north of the region. A case in point is the village of Guatacondo, the design and scope of which suggests that it could have served as a centre for ceremonies and redistribution (Núñez 1974).