The collection recovered from the buried longhouses is dominated, in its most scientifically significant dimensions, by the organic objects that would have disappeared from any other site.

The wooden harpoon shafts, the bentwood boxes, the fishing gear, the woven mats and baskets, the carved decorative objects: these are the primary record of the technology and material culture, not secondary traces of it.

The correction that Ozette provides is not limited to its specific content.

It also provides a model for what other Northwest Coast sites, if similarly preserved, would contain.

The standard picture of Northwest Coast pre-contact material culture, assembled from stone-tool sites and shell middens, is a radically impoverished version of the actual material world of the people who lived along this coast.