It is one of continuity maintained across centuries of disruption.

The Broader Significance for Northwest Coast Archaeology

The Ozette excavation had effects on Northwest Coast archaeology that extended well beyond the specific findings at the site.

Before Ozette, the pre-contact material culture of the Northwest Coast was known primarily from stone tools, shell middens, and the ethnographic and historical record of the contact period and later.

The ethnographic record was rich: the observations of early European visitors, the systematic documentation conducted by professional anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the collections assembled by museums and universities during that period.

But the ethnographic record documented a culture that had already been substantially transformed by decades of contact, trade, disease, and other influences.