The Native Village Buried By A Mudslide For 500 Years — And The 55,000 Artifacts Found Preserved Beneath The Mud

The Makah Cultural and Research Center, established to house and interpret the Ozette collection, was designed with these storage and display requirements in mind.

The Makah Cultural and Research Center

The artifacts recovered from Ozette never left Makah custody.

This is a fact of profound importance that distinguishes the Ozette project from the majority of significant Native American archaeological excavations in American history, in which the materials recovered ended up in university or museum collections far from the communities whose ancestral heritage they represented.

From the beginning of the excavation, the understanding between the Makah Tribe and Washington State University was that the tribe owned the collection.