The portion of the collection that consists of major, intact, and extraordinary objects is smaller than the total count suggests, but it is still large by the standards of pre-contact Northwest Coast archaeology.

Hundreds of wooden objects in various states of completeness and preservation, many of them without parallel in any other archaeological context, constitute the core of what makes the collection remarkable.

Supplementing this wooden core are thousands of objects in stone, bone, shell, and other materials, many of which provide specific information about the Makah community that would be available from these types of objects alone in sites without the organic preservation.

The proper way to think about the 55,000-object total is as the complete assemblage of a 500-year-old community inventory: everything that was in and around six longhouses at a specific moment, preserved by the specific conditions of the mudslide, and recovered over 11 years of careful excavation.