It exists at Ozette specifically because of the preservational accident of the mudslide.

What Stone Cannot Tell You

The most important methodological contribution of the Ozette excavation is perhaps the easiest to misunderstand: what it demonstrated about how incomplete the standard archaeological record is.

In most pre-contact North American sites, what survives is stone.

Stone tools, stone debitage (the flakes produced when stone tools are made), and occasionally the burned or otherwise preserved remains of fire features or structural elements.

In some coastal sites, shell middens preserve the shells of mollusks and sometimes the bones of fish and marine mammals.