The uses which human beings made of their herd animals in the pre-Hispanic past are attested by the remains excavated from archaeological sites. In the Atacama, the prevailing climatic conditions are arid; hence the range of animal-derived products obtained from excavations is varied, including fleece, hide, sun-dried meat as well as the bones. In less arid regions, where conditions do not favour the preservation of organic remains, animal bones provide the only direct evidence for the exploitation of animals. This study, in contrast, relies on the direct examination of a product for which the camelids were valued: the fleece itself.13 The need for reliable supplies of fleece was, as will be demonstrated in this book, an important factor in the process of maintaining herds of camelids in the Andes. Domestication of the camelids was not a necessary step that preceded the widespread use of animal fleece in the making of yarns and fabrics. However, with the domestication of the camelids, animals are more readily available for shearing while they are still alive. Nowadays, camelids are normally shorn every other year. Since most llamas and alpacas are slaughtered at the age of seven or eight years, an animal may be shorn two or three times during its lifespan. However, much will depend on the fleece growth characteristics of the individual animal and how old it was at the first shearing. If the fleece which is pulled from the hide after the animal dies or is slaughtered is taken into account, the owner may expect to gain as much as four times the amount of fleece from one domesticated camelid as from a hunted one. This means that pastoralists, as owners of camelids, have access to greater quantities of fleece than do hunters of wild camelids. What herders did with their more abundant supplies of fleece, and how modern herders attempt to increase such supplies, are themes examined here.
From a materialistic perspective it might be said that the usefulness of vicuña, guanaco, llamas and alpacas to human beings is that they can be slaughtered to provide meat and raw materials. A superficial examination of the uses of camelid products among present-day herders might also support such a conclusion. In Isluga, most of the animal is used as a source of food, and when a llama or alpaca
is slaughtered only the appendix is thrown to the cat. The long bones provide marrow, and even the lower limbs are roasted. The padded foot of the llama is considered to be a great delicacy. Some bones are used to make tools. The scapulae are used, unmodified, for harvesting potatoes, and one of the right metapodials (the metatarsal is preferred) is shaped into a pointed weaving tool, which is used to beat the weft into the fell of the fabric (see Miller 1979: 77–9). The hide may be used to cover drums, and the thick leather from the neck is cut into narrow strips for lashing beams together (for example, the rafters of a house). The neck leather may be also used to make sandals. Fleece, of course, is exploited in many different ways, which are discussed in this work. Finally, llamas may be used as beasts of burden.
However, this materialistic perspective is, at best, only a partial picture. Unfortunately, such a view has prevailed in the archaeological literature, and many authors have considered the exploitation of animals by different peoples of the past in terms of little more than a relentless quest for food. In his study of Formative period sites at Caserones and Tarapacá 40A and B, northern Chile, Lautaro Núñez lists all the animal bones registered from the site as food (Núñez 1982: tables 1 and 2). He suggests that after the maize harvest, the vegetable remains were fed to camelids along with shrubs inedible to human beings, so that plant foods with a high cellulose content were cycled to provide meat for human beings (ibid.: 106–7). This may indeed have been the case, but human–camelid relationships were undoubtedly more complex than that, as indicated by the different animal products found at these sites.
An even more serious consequence of regarding herded animals as no more than suppliers of dressed meat is to be found in an article by Gray Graffam. He argues that llamas represented a minor contribution to the ‘annual caloric budget’ of families living in the Titicaca Basin in the period following the collapse of the Tiwanaku state (Graffam 1992: 890). Since he fails to take into account other products afforded by llamas (such as fleece and hides at an altitude where clothing is an essential aspect of human survival), he came to the conclusion that intensive agriculture subsidized the keeping of camelids (ibid.: 887). In his scenario, herding and intensive agriculture on raised fields are seen as antagonistic activities, with the latter maintaining the people who persisted in practising the former. Nowhere does he discuss different strategies undertaken by farmers in order to minimize risk while maintaining satisfactory yields (Hastorf 1993: 29–30). Instead he repeats, but does not acknowledge, a statement originally made by C. Daryll Forde in 1934 that pastoralism never developed as a separate economy anywhere in the Andes (Graffam 1992: 890; Forde 1934: 394). Forde considered pastoralism to have arisen in the Americas with the introduction of sheep to the Navajo by the Spanish. However, Jorge Flores Ochoa conclusively disproved this position when he published in 1968 an ethnography of the pastoralist people of Paratía in southern Peru.
One of the important points emphasised by Flores Ochoa (1979a: 8) is the commitment that pastoralists make in caring for their herd animals. The quality of the bond maintained between human beings and animals is the hallmark of a
pastoral way of life. This means that regarding herd animals merely as providers of food and raw materials cannot be a sufficient explanation for understanding human–herd animal relationships. At best, such an approach can seek to explore only a partial view of human motivations in the relationship. This book attempts to explore the paradoxes between caring for generation after generation of herd animal, while at the same time using those animals for their fleece and hides.