The final and most encompassing way to understand what the mud at Ozette preserved is not in terms of the individual objects, remarkable as they are.

It is in terms of the total picture that the collection, the site, and the community knowledge together make available.

Before Ozette, the pre-contact Makah community was known primarily through the ethnographic and historical record of the contact period and later, supplemented by the stone-tool and shell-midden record of the archaeological sites that had been investigated.

This was a meaningful body of evidence, but it was limited in its temporal depth and in its organic coverage.

After Ozette, the pre-contact Makah community is known with a specificity and intimacy that no other pre-contact Northwest Coast site can match.