I began this report with an observation and with an objective. The observation was that we know very little about the processes that led up to the formation of the Tiwanaku state, and that this lack of information seriously hampers attempts to compare the Titicaca Basin trajectory to that of other, better-documented areas of primary state formation, such as Oaxaca or the Basin of Mexico. The objective, of course, was to provide an account of long-term change in the southern Titicaca Basin in the centuries preceding Tiwanaku state formation. Such an account was to be sensitive to the particularities of Titicaca Basin ecology and history and still maintain a focus on cross-cultural developmental regularities - Steward's ``phenomena of limited occurrence'' - which permit comparisons with other regional sequences.
That account was provided at some length in Chapters 5 through 8, with additional data on later developments provided in Chapters 9 and 10. By way of conclusion, I would like to discuss the broader outlines of the sequence as I have presented it, and reflect briefly on some of the processes and events which shaped it. In the body of the thesis, my discussion was organized by the southern Titicaca Basin ceramic chronology. The chronology, obviously, is a fundamental factor structuring our understanding of prehistory. In this final chapter, however, I would like to consider the social and evolutionary processes operating through time and to summarize the regional sequence in terms of what we might call social evolutionary stages. Each stage may be distinguished from the others in terms of general social processes.