It is known through early Spanish accounts that native Ecuadorians used balsa rafts fitted with sails to travel along the northern Andean coast to trade. Indeed, the first king of Lambayeque, where axe-monies are known to have been manufactured, is said in ethnohistorical accounts to have arrived in the city by raft. The Chincha of Peru and Manteño of Ecuador in particular are good candidates for the origin many of these traders. Furthermore, there is solid archaeological evidence for the trade of Spondylus shells, which can be gathered between the Gulf of Guayaquil in Ecuador and the Gulf of Mexico, in the Andean highlands during the Chavín culture. Furthermore, contemporary accounts from the Balsas River in western Mexico report that the fathers and grandfathers of local men had traded with canoe-borne traders, who sometimes spent as long as half a year in the area. However, there is as yet no firm archaeological evidence of the presence of either Ecuadorians in Mexico or vice versa.
This trading system was therefore ancient; it is suggested by Dewan and Hosler that these traders operated along the Andean coast from Colombia in the north to Chile in the south as early as 100 BCE. Using mathematical models, they demonstrate that it is hypothetically possible for balsa rafts to sail not just along coastal routes, but in the open ocean between Ecuador and Michoacán. An earlier proposal for the route by Coe suggest a more coastal route for trade.
Hosler suggests that traders from South America introduced metallurgical techniques into western Mexico in two waves. First between  and 1250 CE, and second between c. 1250 and the Spanish conquest. It was during the second period that axe-monies are found in western Mexico, though antecedent forms are found in contexts dated as early as 800 CE in Ecuador. Yet while both South American traditions were influential in western Mexico, idiomatic traits and styles arose in the region, growing out of the imported traditions.