The Native Village Buried By A Mudslide For 500 Years — And The 55,000 Artifacts Found Preserved Beneath The Mud

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The Makah Before the Slide: Reading Deeper Layers

The excavation at Ozette was not confined to the slide layer and its buried longhouses.

Below the slide deposit, and in areas adjacent to it, the excavators encountered earlier deposits that provided evidence of human occupation at Cape Alava extending much further back in time than the 500-year-old slide.

These deeper deposits could not provide the extraordinary spatial and organic preservation that the slide layer offered, because they were not sealed by the same type of covering and had been subject to normal decomposition processes for much longer periods.