The construction required access to large cedar logs, the tools and skills to split and adorn the planks, and the organized labor to build and maintain structures that might be 60 feet or more in length and 40 feet or more in width.

Inside each longhouse, distinct sections along the walls corresponded to individual family units.

Each family area might have its own hearth, its own storage, its own sleeping area.

The interior space of a longhouse was an organized domestic landscape that encoded family relationships, storage practices, and the functional arrangement of everyday life.

When the mudslide buried these structures, it preserved not just the buildings but the interior arrangements.

Archaeologists working at Ozette could, over the course of the excavation, trace the layout of the longhouses in considerable detail.