Evidence for the hunting of camelids has been found at archaeological sites in the Peruvian Andes dating back 12000 years.
These were not alpacas though, they were guanaco and vicuña. Almost 6000 years will pass until the first alpacas are seen . . .
There is debate about the exact origins of the alpaca and the other New World Camelids. The earliest remains are those of the guanaco and the vicuña - llamas and alpacas come later. It is thought that alpacas could have been the result of deliberate crossing of vicuña and llama, with llama having themselves developed from guanaco. Other theories have a guanaco-llama line developing separately form a vicuña-alpaca line. The work has been based on the fossil record where dentition and cranial capacity have been examined, and on living animals where behavioural studies, haemoglobin amino acid sequences and skin and fibre characteristics have enable comparison of the four extant camelids. See panel alongside for references.
By whatever route the alpaca arose, its early domestication by the Incas allowed its numbers to boom, and the Incan animal breeding programs produced exceptionally fine and consistent fleeces that would be be envy of many breeders now. This fantastic development was stopped in its tracks stopped in its tracks in 1532 when the invading forces of the Spanish Conquest devastated the Incan civilisation and culture, and massacred alpaca herds to replace them with sheep.
The story now goes on hold until 1836 when the pioneering English wool spinner Titus Salt discovered three hundred bales of alpaca fibre on the dock side in Liverpool. He began to buy up all the limited amount of alpaca coming into the country and manufactured a very luxurious cloth from it. It had the feel of silk at the price of wool and alpaca’s future was sealed when Queen Victoria began to wear it. Going into the marketplace at the luxury end meant that demand continued to grow amongst the wealthier fashion-conscious Victorians and in 1851 Titus Salt built his mill at Saltaire near Bingley to process the fibre from raw fleece to finished cloth. Saltaire was a truly Model Village and comprised good-quality housing, chapels, bath-houses, schools, an institute, clubs and an infirmary. Sir Titus Salt died in 1879 with his business empire still flourishing. It collapsed shortly afterwards with a wider decline in the textile industry.
Alpaca continued to be imported as raw, unsorted fleece from South America, particularly from Peru, and this continued until the 1950s when another Englishman, Frank Mitchell, established further sorting and processing in Peru itself. Fleeces were sorted by colour and by grade.
Land reform in the 1970s meant fewer co-operatives and large scale haciendas, and more small individual producers, frequently in remote locations. Less attention was paid to breeding for quality and the fibre suffered. The depredations of terrorist groups in the area in the 1980s and early 1990s led many overseas agents to close down their operations. The role of middlemen in selling fibre became more important and the business place is now complex.
There are several highly successful breeders producing fabulous quality animals on a huge scale in Peru though. As well as producing high quality fleece, these animals are also bred for export to the countries that have recently established their own breeding herds, often on the back of many years of success in the sheep breeding and fibre conversion industries. These include North America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, in particular, the UK.
In these “new” alpaca countries, the emphasis is on developing their national herds to a size where it becomes economically feasible for commercial producers to process the fibre, and to take advantage of economies of scale to produce finished garments that are still luxurious but are more accessible.
