Cross-cultural studies of human adaptation to mountain environments have revealed a number of common features between production strategies employed by people in the Andes, the Himalaya, and the Alps (Funnell and Parish 2001;Guillet 1983;Rhoades and Thompson 1975;Tomka 2001). These commonalities in adaptation to mountain settings include:

1. Both specialized and mixed procurement systems are found, but there is a predominance of mixed systems.
2. Specialized procurement systems are interconnected through regional exchange.
3. Land holdings by a particular social unit can be non-contiguous and distributed across multiple ecological niches.
4. In extensive procurement zones, such as grazing areas, land tenure is communal, whereas in intensive procurement, such as irrigated farmland, tenure is often family based.

These strategies are responses to characteristics of mountain settings that include altitude-based biotic ecozones, limited productivity in any single zone, and risk to herding and farming in production activities.

These regular features of production in mountain settings provide a comparison against which to evaluate procurement strategies in the Andes. A number of characteristics of production common to mountain environments have been inappropriately conceived as exclusively Andean in an essentialist tradition referred to as lo andino (Starn 1991;Van Buren 1996), while conversely others have sought to impose Andean models on regions where the model does not necessarily apply (Goldstein and Messerschmidt 1980). These models of regional interaction in mountain environments, both in Andean and general geographical models, can be contrasted with regional distributions of raw materials. Obsidian and other raw materials circulated widely in the Andes, and the spatial patterns described by these materials, may be examined in light of other regional patterning like stylistic distributions, as well as economic models of regional interaction.