The Students and the Communities They Came From

One of the aspects of the Ozette excavation that is sometimes overlooked in accounts focused on the scientific findings is the educational dimension of the project.

Over the 11 years of major fieldwork, the excavation employed Makah community members as crew, providing both economic benefit and the direct engagement with the excavation that gave community members firsthand knowledge of what was being recovered and how.

This employment was a deliberate policy, not simply an incidental result of the project’s structure.