As a catastrophe, it buried six longhouses and whatever was in or around them, destroying the community’s investment in those structures and their contents and forcing relocation.

As a gift, it preserved those same structures and contents in a condition that 500 years of ordinary occupation and decay would have destroyed.

The relationship between destruction and preservation is not unique to Ozette.

Pompeii is the most famous example, as discussed above, but there are others: the bog bodies of northern Europe preserved by the oxygen-poor chemistry of peat bogs, the frozen mummies of the Andes preserved by the extreme cold of high altitude burial, the desert-preserved manuscripts and organic materials of arid climates.

In each case, a specific combination of conditions that happened to be present at a specific moment created a preservation environment that maintained things which should, by normal processes, have long since disappeared.