The Inca state ran on llamas in a literal sense. They carried cargo, they supplied wool and meat, and they were the standard offering, given in numbers that the Spanish chroniclers found difficult to credit: hundreds at a single festival, with colour and age specified for the occasion. Brown llamas went to the creator, white to the sun, and a particular spotted animal to the thunder.
One white llama was kept at Cusco, dressed in a red tunic and gold ornaments and treated as a representative of the sun rather than as a sacrifice. The care of the state herds was an administrative function with its own officials, and the herds themselves were divided between the sun, the state and the community.
Divination came with it. Chroniclers describe the inspection of the lungs of a sacrificed llama, inflated through the trachea, with the pattern of the veins read for the outcome of a campaign or a season. The practice is close to what several Old World traditions did with sheep livers, and the two are independent.
Llama offerings did not stop with the empire. Fat, wool and dried foetuses remain standard components of the mesa, the offering bundle burned or buried for the earth, and they are sold openly in markets in La Paz and elsewhere. The continuity is not an antiquarian survival; it is a working practice with a market behind it.