Andean Altiplano, Peru or Bolivia
AA-2026-6F8338
On the image
Someone has run a fence line straight through the middle of a high Andean marsh, the kind of engineering decision that assumes livestock will respect a property boundary better than a river does. The braided streams below it ignore the fence entirely, forking and rejoining across the bofedal exactly as they did before anyone thought a post-and-wire line was necessary. The animals graze in loose clusters wherever the grass is thickest, unbothered by the human conviction that land needs dividing.
This is herding country at roughly twelve thousand feet, where the flat valley floor holds water long enough each year to keep a ribbon of green pasture alive between barren volcanic hills. Families here built their entire economy on knowing exactly which patches of that wetland would still be wet in the dry season, a kind of knowledge no fence could improve on. The camera catches the fence doing its one job – marking a line on film – while the actual grazing pattern below happens according to older rules.
The historian's note
The high-altitude wetland pastures known as bofedales sustain llama and alpaca herding across the Andean altiplano of southern Peru and Bolivia, a region centred on the Lake Titicaca basin above 3,800 metres elevation. These natural marshes, fed by snowmelt and mountain springs, remain green through the dry season and have supported Aymara and Quechua pastoral communities for many centuries, predating and outlasting the introduction of fenced grazing boundaries.
By the 1960s, camelid herding on the altiplano combined subsistence practices largely unchanged since pre-Columbian times with incremental modern land-use markers such as fencing and vehicle tracks, visible evidence of encroaching private-property conventions on communally managed grazing land. The volcanic tablelands and mesas in the background are typical of the region's geology, formed by ancient lava flows later eroded into flat-topped ridges.
Scenes of this kind document a pastoral economy still centred on camelid fibre and meat production, an economic base that has persisted with relatively little disruption into the present day.
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Alpaca Herd on the Altiplano Wetlands, Peru or Bolivia, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-6F8338. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/alpaca-herd-on-the-altiplano-wetlands-peru-or-bolivia-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20266F8338,
title = {Alpaca Herd on the Altiplano Wetlands, Peru or Bolivia, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-6F8338},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/alpaca-herd-on-the-altiplano-wetlands-peru-or-bolivia-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Alpaca Herd on the Altiplano Wetlands, Peru or Bolivia, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-6F8338 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/alpaca-herd-on-the-altiplano-wetlands-peru-or-bolivia-1960s ER -
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