The formline tradition is well-documented in the contact-period and later record, but there has always been the theoretical possibility that its specific manifestations were shaped or influenced by contact-period changes.

The Ozette objects establish that the core elements of the tradition were present before sustained contact, providing a baseline for understanding the tradition’s long-term history.

The scale and diversity of the household inventory of a pre-contact Makah family: this would be unknown without Ozette.

Ethnographic sources describe some of what Makah households possessed, but they describe the contact-period household after decades or centuries of change, and they cannot fully document the range of everyday domestic objects that were in common use.

The Ozette assemblage provides a direct inventory of what was present in six longhouses at a specific moment.