In a few exceptionally well-preserved sites in very dry or very cold environments, other organic materials occasionally survive.

But across the vast majority of pre-contact sites in the Pacific Northwest and along the Northwest Coast, the wooden, fiber, and plant-based objects that were the dominant medium of daily life and material culture are entirely absent.

They are not rare.

They are gone.

The archaeologist who excavates a pre-contact site in the coastal forests of Washington or British Columbia without a preservational advantage like Ozette’s waterlogged seal is excavating a radically impoverished sample of what was actually present.

This is the single most important implication of the Ozette assemblage: most of the material culture of pre-contact Northwest Coast societies was made of organic materials that decay.