They are primary evidence for a material culture that existed before the disruptions, displacements, and transformations of European contact.

They document what was being made and used in the century and a half or two centuries before European vessels began to appear on the Northwest Coast with any regularity.

They establish a baseline for understanding what Makah material life looked like before the changes that followed contact.

Wood is the medium of Northwest Coast artistic and technological tradition in a way that stone is not.

The great totem poles, the elaborately carved canoes, the decorated chests and house posts, the masks and ceremonial equipment: all of these are expressions of a woodworking tradition of extraordinary sophistication.