THE ANDEAN MARRIAGE WITH NATURE.

Ancient Peru has a long and rich history. The Andean Mountains were the traditional home of the ancestral people. To this day, the Andes still support many of the current surviving descendants, some still claiming a direct ancestry.
Since ancient times Andean cultures have had an extraordinary relationship with their natural environment.
They did not conceive the idea of humans as being separated from nature. They saw themselves as complementing it by being intended collaborators to it.
Ancient people had a profound understanding of plants and animals, and their survival was based upon agriculture and pastoral craftsmanship, which required working in close harmony with the natural world.
They learned how to cultivate and care for the soil, and clearly it is observed the importance that farming and food supply had to them. Fibers came from it, challenging them to learn how to spin and color the fibers with plants, insects, and minerals. Then ritual and utilitarian textiles for any type of need were then produced. Luxury textiles for divine and royal use were made in extremely elaborate, difficult, time-consuming, and labor-intensive techniques. Not other people in history put so much energy into the nature of textile fibers and what their hands and mind crafted out of them. Through their art we can enter into a dialogue with their remarkable minds. There are many ways in which cloth can serve as historical text. Aspects of religion, economic relationship, ethnicity, and personal data are all proclaimed in it. The motifs communicate many kinds of information as well as history. Details are guarded in the memory of the one who knows how to read them.
In the case of knotted "quipus"(cords of different colors and knotted at different levels) for example, they conveyed an extensive amount of information known only to the ones able decipher it. The quipucamayoc was the keeper and the interpreter of it, but in an oral form, another one was trained to interpret the position and color of the knot.
Beans and severe heads appeared interchangeable in Nazca imagery. Beans were one of the main sources of food and as a desert culture, water was scarcely found. Food had to be respected under any circumstances, and mythically in the phantom world, there were forces trying to ruin what was planted.
The representation of those forces are through the severed heads that were collected and buried as an offering to the spirit of nature announcing the restoring of peace to the soil.
When ancient Andean people encountered forms in nature that resonated with their world of ideas, they did not hesitate to modify or tame those natural objects to conform more closely with their ideal World. For example, in a boulder atop Machu Picchu, they saw a form similar to the nearby Huayna Picchu Mountain, and proceeded to sculpt the Mountain's portrait into the stone.
To honor the spirits that take form as mountains and its positive use to the forces of nature, the stone workers carved rock outcrops to replicate their shapes. Doorways and windows of sublimely precise masonry frame exquisite views. This extraordinary marriage of setting and nature explains the fame of Machu Picchu today. The granite stones seem almost alive.
The archaeological remains of the city-capital of the Inca empire represent one of the most striking images of Peruvian ancestry. The majestic scenery of this ancient ruin perched high in the Andes is used to symbolize the resilience of Peruvian traditions. The fact that Machu Picchu lies on an 8,000 ft (2,440 m) mountaintop and that it escaped destruction by the time of colonization looms large in the imagination of Peruvians and tourists. The ruins evoke the nation's Andean past and legitimize both Peru's historical heritage and cultural tradition.