What those artifacts documented was not a lost civilization or a mysterious ancient culture.

They documented the specific household life of a specific community: the Makah people at Ozette, living in the centuries before sustained European contact, maintaining a maritime economy and material culture of great sophistication.

The wooden objects, preserved by the same mud that buried them, showed the forms of technology that previously could only be inferred from later ethnographic collections and oral tradition.

The spatial arrangement of objects within the houses showed how a household was organized, where activities took place, how storage was managed.