Anthropologist Patricia Anawalt sees obvious connections between cultures of coastal South America and West Mexico. Clothing styles, fabric patterns, and personal adornments depicted on shaft-tomb figures are strikingly similar to ones represented on figures or found at archaeological sites along the northwestern coast of South America. Ecuadorian traders sailed great distances along the Pacific coast in search of supplies of Spondylusshells, which they provided to the elite of Peru’s powerful kingdoms. One source of the mollusk for them may have been off the coast of West Mexico. The presence of shaft tombs and similar dog and bird species in South America and West Mexico, but not elsewhere in Mesoamerica, supports the culture contact theory.

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