Recognizing and protecting such sites when they are identified requires understanding what makes them special.

The Gifts of Disaster

In the long view of human history, catastrophic events that destroy are sometimes the same events that preserve.

The volcanic eruption that obliterated Roman Pompeii and killed hundreds of its inhabitants is also the event that sealed its streets and buildings in ash and preserved them for excavation 1,700 years later.

The bog that drowned the individuals whose bodies were found preserved in northern European peat bogs is the same bog whose chemistry maintained those bodies across millennia.

At Ozette, the catastrophe was a mudslide.