The characteristic ovoid shapes, the curved design elements, the specific conventions for depicting eyes, joints, and body forms: these are present in the Ozette material and recognizable to anyone familiar with the ethnographic tradition.

The pre-contact and post-contact manifestations of the tradition are continuous rather than discontinuous.

This continuity has important implications for understanding the history of Northwest Coast art.

There has sometimes been a tendency in popular culture and even in scholarship to treat the spectacular totem poles, carved canoes, and ceremonial objects of the nineteenth century as if they represented a peak or culmination of the tradition.

The Ozette evidence suggests instead that the tradition was already highly developed centuries before those nineteenth-century examples were produced.