The combination of the material evidence from Ozette and the oral and ceremonial knowledge maintained by the community provides a much more complete picture of the whale hunt than either alone could offer.

The artifacts document the technology.

The oral tradition documents the cultural context.

Neither is sufficient without the other.

This relationship between material evidence and oral knowledge is a general principle that extends beyond whaling to every aspect of the cultural life documented at Ozette.

The household objects, the fishing gear, the artistic objects: all of these existed within a cultural framework of meanings, practices, and relationships that the objects themselves cannot fully encode.

The living community is the repository of that framework, and the dialogue between the material evidence and the living knowledge is the foundation of any complete understanding.