When you're an art major and you're taking Art & Architecture of Peru, you have to acknowledge the museums. Entire textbooks have been devoted to Peruvian art history, so I'll try to do it justice in fewer words.

What made Peruvian art history so refreshing is that the highest form was the textile. What westerners have previously considered craft arts (such as weaving, ceramics, sculpture, jewelry-making) were regarded with elevated status, involved effort, and masterfully refined technique in ancient Andean cultures. They still are today.

Chinchero weavers at work

Textile from the Paracas culture, about 1,000 years old

Art historians have analyzed the level of skill and social stratification to achieve such expertise (not even getting into architecture), and it's plain impressive. Society revolved around woven objects. They were used in daily life, for religious sacrifices, for mummification and burials, for differentiating social status, for distinguishing tribes, even for city planning. And they were woven well. The only woven fabrics to surpass them in stitches per square inch didn't arrive until the industrial revolution. Additionally, the Inca are famous for their quipu mathematical and literary system, though it was knot-based.

Through slip-molds and coils, Peruvian potters were able to mass-produce vessels long before the pottery wheel was brought from the Old World. Shelves upon shelves of pots have survived and can be viewed at Museo Larco in Lima.

Stirrup-spouted vessels in Museo Larco

Termed "inefficient" by westerners, the labor-intensive art forms of precolonial Peru assigned value to an artwork; they didn't detract from it. Foreign to western philosophies are many important Andean beliefs, including reciprocity, duality, the cyclical nature of time, destruction and construction, two converging to make a third. Everything is spiritual, artistic, biological, otherworldly and concrete at the same time. These values were essential to pre-Colombian religion, society, and survival in the harsh Andean world.