The archaeologist working such a site can recover a partial picture at best: the tools of stone that were used in various activities, the shells of mollusks consumed for food, and the waste products of various processing activities preserved in durable form.

This picture is systematically biased toward the durable and away from the organic.

It gives a false impression of the actual material world of the people who lived at the site.

A community whose primary technology was woodworking, fiber arts, and the construction of complex organic-material tools appears in this record only through the secondary stone tools used to shape and process organic materials, not through the organic materials themselves.

Ozette corrected this bias for one specific site and one specific moment in time.