What the preservation does not provide is the full story of the people who lived in those houses.

The slide preserved the material record but not the social, spiritual, or intellectual dimensions of life.

The relationships between the people who lived there, the ceremonies they conducted, the songs they sang, the stories they told, the decisions they made: these are not in the mud.

They are in the oral traditions that the Makah community maintained, in the practices that continued in relocated communities, in the cultural transmission that survived the catastrophe and continued through the centuries of change that followed.

The full history of the Ozette community, and of the Makah people, requires both the material evidence from the excavation and the living cultural knowledge of the community.