Generations of people — hundreds of generations — lived, hunted, fished, gathered, traveled, made tools, built communities, developed languages, maintained traditions, adapted to changing environments, and died in the landscape of the Olympic Peninsula and its surroundings.

The vast majority of these people left no surviving physical trace.

Their campsites decomposed.

Their tools and implements, made from organic materials that were practical and appropriate for their environment but perishable by nature, dissolved into the soil within years or decades of being discarded.

Their languages changed beyond recognition over centuries and millennia.

The archaeological record of the Pacific Northwest — as rich as it is by the standards of any region that has experienced this much environmental change — preserves a fraction of a fraction of the human history that actually occurred.

The stone tools that survive are real, but they are only the durable part of a material culture that included enormous quantities of non-durable objects.