The relocation and rebuilding that followed was the necessary response to a disaster, not the grateful receipt of a preservation windfall.

But the geology and chemistry of the slide created something that generations of scholars and community members would later value enormously: a sealed, anaerobic deposit that held the household contents of six families in a condition that allowed recovery and study five centuries later.

This is the central irony of the Ozette site.

The same event that destroyed part of a living village preserved it for the future in a way that the continued habitation and eventual abandonment of the village could not have done.

The normal fate of a pre-contact Northwest Coast village site is the gradual decay of all organic material, leaving only stone and occasionally shell to document that people had lived there.