wikuña

Vicuña (also spelled vicuña, vizcacha in some historical forms) comes from Spanish vicuña, borrowed from Quechua wikuña — the native name for Vicugna vicugna, the small wild camelid native to the high puna grasslands of the central Andes at altitudes of 3,500 to 5,700 meters. The Spanish adaptation changed the Quechua initial w- to v- (a phonological adjustment, since early modern Spanish treated v and b as near-identical) and altered the final vowel, but the word remained close enough to its source that most etymologists consider it a direct loan with minimal transformation. English borrowed it from Spanish without further change. The word entered European records in the early seventeenth century, at roughly the same time as other Andean animal names — llama, alpaca, guanaco — as Spanish natural historians catalogued the unfamiliar fauna of the New World.

The vicuña is the smallest of the four South American camelids and the wild ancestor of the alpaca, which was domesticated from vicuña stock around six thousand years ago. It inhabits the extreme high altitude of the puna, the treeless grassland above the cloud forest, where temperatures can drop sharply even in summer and oxygen partial pressure is roughly half that at sea level. The vicuña's fleece is its adaptation to this environment: extremely fine (as low as 12 microns in diameter, compared to 25 microns for standard wool and 15 microns for cashmere), dense enough to trap body heat against Andean cold, soft enough that the animal requires no undercoat. Each individual vicuña yields roughly 250 grams of fiber per year — less than a third of a kilogram — which can only be harvested every two to three years. The fiber's scarcity is biological, not artificial.

The Inca state maintained elaborate institutions around the vicuña. The chaku was a great communal roundup conducted periodically across the high puna: thousands of people formed a human chain miles in diameter and walked inward, herding vicuñas into a central enclosure. The animals were shorn and released unharmed — the Inca understood that killing vicuñas was economically foolish when their renewable fiber was the point. The fleece, called qompi when woven, was reserved by Inca sumptuary law for the Sapa Inca (the emperor) and the highest nobility; wearing vicuña without royal permission was a serious offense. When the Spanish conquistadors first encountered vicuña fabric, they compared its fineness to silk. Charles V of Spain was sent vicuña cloth as a gift and reportedly described it as softer than anything he had felt in Europe.

Vicuña nearly went extinct in the twentieth century. After the Spanish broke the Inca's carefully managed chaku system, commercial hunting for the fiber drove the population from an estimated two to three million animals at the time of conquest to fewer than ten thousand by the 1960s — a collapse of over ninety-nine percent. The 1969 Vicuña Convention between Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina and the subsequent protections placed the animal on national and international endangered species lists, ended commercial hunting, and gradually restored the chaku tradition. Today the population has recovered to roughly 350,000 animals, and legal vicuña fiber — still among the most expensive natural materials on earth, selling for hundreds of dollars per ounce of processed yarn — comes only from live-shorn animals in state-supervised chakus.