The cave systems of Prince of Wales Island represented a different kind of archaeological resource — one with the potential to preserve the skeletal remains that shell middens typically lack.

The formal survey of the island’s cave systems that led to the investigation of On Your Knees Cave was a deliberate effort to exploit this preservation potential in the interest of understanding the island’s early human history.

The broader archaeological context of the region also includes evidence for the antiquity of specific technologies and subsistence practices that define the Northwest Coast adaptation.

Fish-processing sites, stone projectile points suited to maritime hunting, and other technological evidence from early Holocene contexts across the region document the development of maritime technology from a period very close to the deglaciation of the coast.